While everyone's attention is on COVID-19, things are still happening around the Russia hoax.  No one should ever forget that a weaponized Obama bureaucracy spied on the Republican party's presidential candidate to prevent him from winning the 2016 election.  Then, when that illegal effort failed, the entire Democrat establishment, both inside and outside government, bent all of its energies to claiming that America's duly elected president was a Russian asset who used election fraud to win.

By first acting illegally and then pushing a hoax, the Democrats and the Deep State (but I repeat myself) effectively handicapped Trump's first two years in office.  They destroyed Americans' trust in government, they destroyed the last fragile shreds of reputation the media had, they corrupted various bureaucracies, and they generally did terrible damage to America's political integrity.

The Trump administration, however, is making loud noises indicating that the Democrats' and the Deep State's flagrant, unethical, unconstitutional, and illegal conduct is neither forgiven nor forgotten.  The first shot openly fired is William Barr's interview with Fox News's Laura Ingraham., which aired on Wednesday.

The interview is an interesting one, for it covers a lot of ground.  For purposes of this post, what's important is what Barr has to say about the attempt to overthrow Trump's presidency through the Russia hoax:

Barr also provided an update on Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham's investigation into the origins of the FBI's Russia investigation, telling Ingraham that Durham's "primary focus isn't to prepare a report. He is looking to bring to justice people who are engaged in abuses if he can show that they were criminal violations, and that's what the focus is on."

"My own view," Barr added, "is that the evidence shows that we're not dealing with just mistakes or sloppiness. There is something far more troubling here, and we're going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law, and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted."

The attorney general left no doubt as to his own view of the investigation, which spanned nearly three years and ended in March 2019, calling it "one of the greatest travesties in American history."

"Without any basis, they started this investigation of his [Trump's] campaign, and even more concerning, actually is what happened after the campaign," Barr said. "[There was] a whole pattern of events while he was president ... to sabotage the presidency ... or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency."

Barr's statements are going to have a lot of Deep State operatives calling their lawyers and sleeping poorly for many nights to come.

The second thing that should make Deep State actors sweat is that John Solomon reports that U.S. intelligence will un-redact footnotes in Michael Horowitz's December review about the FBI's FISA abuse:

The unredacted footnotes are expected to provide new data points in the timeline showing when the FBI learned, or should have suspected, that its key evidence suggesting Trump was colluding with Russia was erroneous and how high up those concerns were known, the sources said.

The new information "will make clear the FBI possessed information at multiple levels that undercut the evidence it was using to sustain a collusion investigation" and will be specific enough to renew a debate in Washington over "whether the FBI intentionally ignored red flags or simply was blinded by ambition from seeing them clearly," one source with direct knowledge said.

The evidence could also raise new questions about whether statements made to Congress during the Russia probe were false or misleading, and whether the intelligence community's official assessment that Vladimir Putin was solely trying to help elect Trump was contradicted by some evidence in FBI files, the sources said.

Lastly, another item related to Horowitz's report comes from Catherine Herridge, an investigative reporter at CBS.  Herridge obtained a recording showing that, in October 2016, George Papadopoulos was emphatically denying that Trump had anything to do with hacking the DNC's email system, especially because doing so was illegal:

The transcript, in which Papadopulos is apparently given the code name "Crossfire Typhoon" or CT, at the end of the hours-long conversation, shows the confidential human source questioning him about the DNC hack:

CHS: You don't think anyone from the Trump campaign had anything to do with the f------ over the, at the DNC? 

Papadopoulos: No

CHS: Really?

Papadopoulos: No. I know that for a fact.  

CHS: How do you know that for a fact?

Papadopoulos: 'Cause I go, I've been working with them for the last nine months. That's (unintelligible) And all of this stuff has been happening, what, the last four months? 

As soon as we're able to leave our homes and go shopping again, we need to stock up on the popcorn.  Politically speaking, the next months should be fun.