There's a great scene in the movie The Sting where Robert Shaw's gangster character deals Paul Newman a good poker hand designed to sucker a big bet, only to have Paul pull his own aces out of his sleeve and win the game.  Shaw later rages to his henchman, "What was I supposed to do?  Call him for cheating better than me?"

That's pretty much what the Democrats have been doing the last four months, with all their complaints about the Russians.  The Dems are the past masters of political dirty tricks.  Their docile media will make a Mt. Everest out of a molehill to frame a Scooter Libby and send him to prison, while Bill Clinton's plundering was so bad that it even embarrassed daughter Chelsea, but few reporters noticed.  And from Bobby Kennedy to Lois Lerner, they have routinely abused federal agencies like the IRS to attack their opponents.  President Obama advanced the process into the internet age, setting up a massive internet boiler room in Chicago to troll voters with fake news.  That way he didn't have to solely rely on Beltway media to repeat garbage like Harry Reid's lie about Romney's taxes.

Republicans for the most part are Boy Scouts who stay away from the ragged edge of the law – or, when they stray, like the Nixon White House, they botch it badly.

With the Russians, though, Democrats fear they have met their match.  Sure, working in a Capitol Hill office or for the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN, etc. is great training to be a rat, liar, and crook, but it's nothing like the KGB.  Those boys use real bullets, and even polonium!

None of the libs/Dems does irony very well, so when WikiLeaks, with its Russian-hacked material, spilled the beans on the Dems' dirty tricks last year – Donna Brazile rigging primary debates, Debbie Wasserman Schultz sabotaging the Sanders campaign, even attacking Bernie's religion – they were beside themselves.  No wonder characters like Evelyn Farkas went on a rampage in 2016 of illegal abuse of our nation's intel capacity, in a desperate attempt to pay back the Russian tricksters for exposing the Democrat tricksters.

Sen. Mark Warner is now even outraged about a supposed Russian internet trolling operation in 2016 to spread anti-Hillary info.  I wonder: wherever did the Russians come up with such an idea?

Warner and other Democrats were also strangely quiet in 2004 when word got out of the British Guardian's bizarre letter-writing campaign to Ohio swing voters in 2004.  That certainly broke all sorts of election laws, but I guess since it was foreign interference directed against a Republican campaign, it didn't count.

By the way, how did the Russians come to get involved in the 2016 elections?  They began in 2015, well before Trump was a factor, and given the likelihood Hillary would be just as feckless and ineffective as Obama, wouldn't Putin prefer her anyway?  I think the answer is that the boys in the Kremlin didn't really care who won the election but just like creating havoc.  Like biker gangs partying in Vegas.   

How does this all end?  For now, the Democrats will keep ranting and raving, and I especially hope Rep. Adam Schiff keeps talking.  He was the one demanding an FBI Russian investigation in 2016 and he keeps trying to revive the discredited Trump dossier.  I suspect he was Mr. Outside in an Obama ploy pressuring the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign, while the Obama Insiders – Farkas, Ben Rhodes, John Brennan, Valerie Jarrett, and the rest – pawed over the phone and email intercepts that resulted.

Eventually, Trump will figure out that he actually needs to appoint some of his people to important jobs, like the leadership of the Department of Justice.  When that happens, they can finally convene a federal grand jury and we can see then if all those Democrats want to keep talking about how they were cheated.  

Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.