The following is copied from the Washington Post website, March 20:

"There's a smell of treason in the air," presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said. "Imagine if J. Edgar Hoover or any other FBI director would have testified against a sitting president? It would have been a mind-boggling event."

Three days later, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, a Trump-hater, put the quote on top of his column: "'A Smell / Of Treason / In the Air.'"  In that column, Kristof asserted that someone who is not a Democrat claims "that there's a persuasive piece of intelligence on ties between Russia and a member of the Trump team that isn't yet public."  What kind of "ties"?  Kristof didn't say.  Kristof continued: "The most likely scenario for collusion seems fuzzier and less transactional than many Democrats anticipate."  He went on to offer "[a] bit of conjecture" suggesting more anti-Trump "sound and fury, signifying nothing."

How about this for "conjecture"?  (First, consider this observation from New York Times columnist David Brooks, whose frothing anti-Trump column of February 17 included this startling comment: "The intelligence community has only just begun to undermine this president."  The Democrats, during the 2016 presidential campaign, desperate to divert attention away from misuse by Hillary Clinton of her personal email server to conduct official State Department business, alleged Russian hacking of Clinton's emails and went from there to claim that Putin meddled in the election to defeat Clinton.  To make the allegation believable, it was necessary to refer to "intelligence" reports, which offered "high confidence" where evidence should have been.   

No thought was given to the chance that the anti-Trump machinations would come to light, because the point of the exercise was to ensure the election of Clinton, guaranteeing that the machinations would never see the light of day.  Indeed, the Clintonistas were convinced that their candidate would become the 45th U.S. president.

Then comes the reality of November 8, 2016, and the first thought of the Clintonistas: we must keep Trump from getting his hands on our files.  (This is not to rule out the likelihood of a great deal of paper-shredding and email-deleting.)  Recall that among the first post-election moves to focus on Trump's links to Putin was the demand from Clinton campaign manager John Podesta to have intelligence officials brief the members of the Electoral College on Russian interference on the 2016 presidential election.  The Clintonistas could, of course, count on their agents in the media to carry reports and columns of Russian ties to the Trump campaign – with, as noted by David Brooks, the intelligence people doing their part "to undermine this president."

Further conjecture: the hope of the Clintonistas that their avalanche of anti-Trump innuendo and smears would encourage anti-Trumpers artfully and publicly to sniff the "smell of treason in the air."  

What we're actually smelling is the unpleasant odor left by Clintonistas more desperate than ever to remove Trump. 

Consider, now, a curious letter in the New York Times, March 24, in which the father of an 11-year-old girl writes that she offers the idea of a constitutional amendment "to rerun an election" obtained through "fraud or treason."  But there is no need to go to such institutional lengths to upend the results of November 8, 2016.  Is there any doubt, now, that the left continues to hope to remove Trump?