...the wolves turn on each other, as Victor Davis Hanson notes in some terrific commentary.

In a piece published in American Greatness, Hanson describes the strange way top U.S. national security officials are all weirdly pointing the finger at each other now that the Mueller report has come up empty. Former CIA Director John Brennan is pointing at former FBI Director James Comey. Comey is pointing at Brennan. Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is pointing at Comey. Comey is pointing at former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe is pointing right back at Comey.

Hanson writes:

James Clapper, John Brennan, and James Comey are now all accusing one another of being culpable for inserting the unverified dossier, the font of the effort to destroy Trump, into a presidential intelligence assessment—as if suddenly and mysteriously the prior seeding of the Steele dossier is now seen as a bad thing. And how did the dossier transmogrify from being passed around the Obama Administration as a supposedly top-secret and devastating condemnation of candidate and then president-elect Trump to a rank embarrassment of ridiculous stories and fibs?

Given the narratives of the last three years, and the protestations that the dossier was accurate or at least was not proven to be unproven, why are these former officials arguing at all? Did not implanting the dossier into the presidential briefing give it the necessary imprimatur that allowed the serial leaks to the press at least to be passed on to the public and thereby apprise the people of the existential danger that they faced?

Each rat is looking to elbow out ahead of the others from the sinking U.S.S. Russia Collusion, and too bad about the ones behind. They are swamp creatures, after all, and this is the way of the swamp.

Hanson points out that none of these people have turned state's evidence to save their own hides, as John Dean once did in the 1970s Watergate scandal which brought down President Nixon.

Yet none of them wants to take credit for the dirty Steele dossier, compiled by Russians apparently affiliated with the some branch of the state, and now coming to light as little more than desinformatsiya, perhaps to get the U.S. security organs busy spying on Trump.

Which sounds like the sort of thing the Russians would do, given their interest in creating chaos and rendering the Trump administration dysfunctional. They are well aware of how to play off to human weakness, and the Trump hate of these people was clearly palpable, an easy thing to manipulate.

None of this would be happening, Hanson notes, had Hillary Clinton won the election. The Russians made no secret of their belief that they thought she would win, and sure enough, the Deep Staters shared that opinion.

Now they're turning on each other to avoid being the last man off the sinking ship. "He did it, not me!' "This is a sorry picture. Read the whole thing here.

Image credit: Monica Showalter