During an appearance with Lawrence O’Donnell on The Last Word a few days ago, a caller asked Joe Biden a very interesting and ironically appropriate question: “Would you be willing to commit to the ideal that no one is above the law?” Because the question had been framed in the context of Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon and Biden was being asked if he would pardon President Trump after being elected, without really thinking, he jumped at the opportunity to boldly proclaim that no one is above the law and said, Yes!”

For once in his life, Biden had blurted out an instinctive and obvious truth, and those words may eventually come back to haunt him. During his very last days as vice president, Biden unmasked General Michael Flynn and by a very strange coincidence, it happened to be the very same day Flynn’s name was leaked to the media. In the unlikely event Biden had some legitimate reason for unmasking Flynn at the time, it’s improbable that he would remember what that reason might have been, more than three years later. Leaking Flynn’s name is a felony punishable by up to ten years in prison.

The moral of the story is be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. The United States is a republic formed by democratic vote, not a monarchy. We elect a president, not a king. Politicians are not royalty. The problem with the question was that it began with the assumption that President Trump committed some sort of crime that would require a pardon to avoid prison. However, after a Mueller investigation that dragged on for a couple of years without revealing any crimes by Trump and an absurd impeachment by the House based on political mud slung by the Democrats using the Steele dossier (which they bought), but no conviction, the American people now know that Trump isn’t guilty of anything.

Nixon never got that far in the process -- he resigned before impeachment to avoid a trial. The caller should have asked Joe Biden a different question: when President Trump is re-elected in November, do you think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that he might pardon you?   

Not long ago Dan Rather tweeted, “Watching President Obama’s graduation address tonight I think I finally understand Obamagate. It’s the scandal of having a president being able to speak with empathy, humor, insight, inspiration, and in complete and coherent sentences.”

Nope, that’s not it, Dan. Not even close. You just don’t get it, but that’s only because you haven’t done your job as a journalist. The problem is that you and your compadres in the lamestream media have never tried to understand the political spy scandal now becoming popularly known as Obamagate.

A reporter recently asked White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany what crimes had allegedly been committed during the Obamagate scandal. The question struck me as weird because I thought that journalists normally investigated that sort of thing themselves, rather than asking to be spoon-fed by press secretaries.  McEnany did an outstanding job ignoring the “gotcha” potential of the question and rattled off a number of crimes connected to the case against Flynn, which included Andrew McCabe for leaking to the Wall Street Journal and lying about it, and James Clapper and John Brennan for both lying to Congress under oath. I’ve previously explained why Obamagate is exponentially worse than Watergate, but I’ll repeat a key point that I made over a year ago: Watergate (the gold standard for scandals) was wrong because members of Richard Nixon’s administration used former CIA operatives to break into the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters for the purposes of spying on the campaign of George McGovern.

By comparison, in the Obamagate scandal, members of the Obama administration used active government FBI resources to spy on General Flynn (a lifelong Democrat) and the Trump campaign using fraudulent opposition research material they knew was false (because they also were responsible for creating it) to disrupt and potentially destroy the incoming administration. Documents were deliberately altered in order to introduce a false narrative into the official record that incriminated a decorated American veteran. 

Then a thoroughly corrupted Department of Injustice prosecuted Flynn, Paul Manafort, and Roger Stone for lying to investigators who were both lying and hiding exculpatory evidence, but the real crimes of the accused were their association with President Trump. I’m not a lawyer, but the crime of sedition would seem to be an obvious one for an independent prosecutor or special prosecutor to pursue in regard to most of the people involved in Obamagate.  Perjury convictions would appear to be a slam dunk.

For three years, the American people have been led to believe by the Democratic Party, the media, and corrupt holdovers from the Obama administration that President Trump is a criminal and under the control of Russia and Vladimir Putin. The reality was that members of the Obama administration and Democratic Party colluded with a former British intelligence agent and some drunk Russians to concoct a puerile fantasy about Donald Trump that they stupidly used as an excuse to then spy on his campaign.

That’s precisely why James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Rod Rosenstein, Peter Strzok, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, plus any number of other Obama administration officials (including Big Ears himself) must be given a fair trial and punished to the full extent of the law, which should include lengthy prison sentences.  It’s hard to believe this much time has passed already, but I used that very term over a year ago when I predicted that the brewing scandal would be worse than Watergate, but even knowing what I knew then, I had no idea how damning the evidence would become. Dwell on this thought for a moment: Barack Obama told former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates details about Flynn’s phone call with Sergey Kislyak during a meeting at the White House, not vice versa. He knew more about the spying on Flynn than his Deputy Attorney General.  

As Private Hudson (Bill Paxton) famously said in the movie Aliens, “It’s game over, man.”

Obama cannot plead ignorance or claim that he only learned about the political spying taking place within his administration after reading the New York Times or Washington Post. He knew and must have approved since he didn’t order the spying on Flynn (and Trump) stopped, even if he wasn’t the mastermind who originally dreamed up this mutinous plot.

The reason it is vitally important for the future of our government that the criminals in the Obamagate scandal are prosecuted can be summed up in a single name: former Republican senator Ted Stevens. Similar to what has been happening to General Flynn, in 2008 a spurious criminal prosecution of Stevens flipped control of the Senate and gave control of both Houses to Democrats, just in time for passage of ObamaCare. Nothing happened to the prosecutors beyond a scolding by the presiding judge -- Emmett Sullivan. Yes, that's the same judge now refusing to dismiss the charges against Flynn. Stevens’ defense attorney Brendan Sullivan said about the federal prosecutors involved, “This was not about mistakes. This is not about negligence. This is not about incompetence. This is about intentional wrongdoing.”

Judge Sullivan was reportedly furious and named a special prosecutor to investigate whether the government lawyers involved should be punished,  saying he’d never seen misconduct and mishandling like that from the Justice Department during his 25 years on the bench.

This begs the question: exactly what in the hell does Sullivan think he’s been seeing in the Michael Flynn case?

John Leonard is a freelance writer and most recently editor of the Rootstock series of epic fantasy novels. You may connect with him on Facebook (where he has a friend named Corn Pop!) or contact him through his website at southernprose.com.