March 18, 2019


Thus will end the central banks' bombastic hubris and the public's faith in central banks' godlike powers.
Having fixed the liquidity crisis of 2008-09 and kept a perversely unequal "recovery" staggering forward for a decade, central banks now believe there is no crisis they can't defeat: Liquidity crisis? Flood the global financial system with liquidity. Interest rates above zero? Create trillions out of thin air and use the "free money" to buy bonds. Mortgage and housing markets shaky? Create another trillion and use it buy up mortgages.

And so on. Every economic-financial crisis can be fixed by creating trillions of out thin air, except the one we're entering--the exhaustion of credit. Central banks, like generals, always prepare to fight the last war and believe their preparation insures their victory.

To read the full blog, click here.

 
by Daniel J. Mitchell

When I wrote about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s so-called Green New Deal, I mostly focused on the very expensive fiscal implications. I also noted that AOC proposed 70 percent tax rate on the rich wouldn't even pay for a tiny fraction of the multi-trillion dollar cost (in other words, you and would be pillaged).


Others focused on some of the inane goals of the legislation, such as phasing out cows and air travel.
For Those "Unwilling to Work"But the part of the plan that produced the most controversy was the promise to provide “economic security” to those “unwilling to work.” This generated so much mockery that it no longer appears in any supporting documents and some supporters even claim that it never was part of the plan.


But some true believers aren’t backing down. Let’s look at some excerpts from Christine Emba’s recent column in the Washington Post.
The rollout of the progressives’ Green New Deal has been less than smooth. One major reason: the release of an FAQ that listed “economic security” for those “unwilling to work” as one of the program’s goals. “Unwilling”? The now-retracted FAQ made other eyebrow-raising claims, but conservatives pounced on that word in particular. …welfare as a reward for laziness, it was called extreme, absurd…a “Communist Manifesto, 21st Century.”


Give Ms. Emba credit.


She didn’t pretend, like many other folks on the left, that the promise of no-strings handouts for the indolent wasn’t part of AOC’s original plan. For this reason, we should probably add her to our collection of honest leftists.


But while I applaud the honesty at the start of her column, the analysis that follows is profoundly awful.


She basically argues that the success of welfare should be judged by whether recipients are happy to get free money.


…is the idea of unconditional economic security really so extraordinary? …A state-dispensed, unconditional cash stipend for every single citizen—whether willing to work or not—has been touted as a way to…perhaps end deep poverty …most Americans look askance at the idea of giving anyone anything free, let alone something as intangible as well-being. It’s life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, after all. Actually getting it is up to you. But what if we thought differently? Well-being—happiness in some sense… Health is a key measure of well-being. Adequate food and housing support it. …Which outcomes do we really care about? …Work isn’t all that matters. Improving well-being is a more than respectable goal.


And she even cites the failed program from Finland to justify her position.


Finland recently completed a landmark basic income project… One of the main goals of the Finnish project was to test whether a basic income would promote employment. …the program wasn’t much of a success: During the first 12 months, at least, basic income recipients fared no better or worse at finding employment than a control group. But it made a radical difference in other ways. “The basic income recipients of the test group reported better well being in every way,” chief researcher Olli Kangas told Reuters.
The Problem with a Basic IncomeFor all intents and purposes, Ms. Emba is lowering the bar for success. Basic income no longer should be supported because it will encourage more work (as some claim). Instead, we should support it because non-working people will be happy to get more handouts.
Let’s think about what that means. I wrote about socialism a week ago and I shared a very persuasive cartoon that shows why the theory has an inherent practical flaw.


While I’m tempted to recycle that cartoon again, this Wizard-of-Id parody makes the same point.


The bottom line is rather grim. A society that taxes productivity and subsidizes idleness over time will get less of the former and more of the latter.


P.S. While recipients express positive thoughts when they get more handouts, Arthur Brooks has explained that depending on others is not a route to a genuinely happy and fulfilled life
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This article was reprinted with permission from International Liberty.

Daniel J. Mitchell

Daniel J. Mitchell is a Washington-based economist who specializes in fiscal policy, particularly tax reform, international tax competition, and the economic burden of government spending. He also serves on the editorial board of the Cayman Financial Review. 

Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nationcontributing editor, he is the author, most recently, of War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.
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How the Russiagate investigation is Sovietizing American politics (by Stephen Cohen)
“Collusion,” “contacts,” selective prosecutions, coup plotting, and media taboos recall repressive Soviet practices.Having studied Soviet political history for decades and having lived off and on in that repressive political system before Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms - in Russia under Leonid Brezhnev in the late 1970s and early 1980s -I may be unduly concerned about similar repressive trends I see unfolding in democratic America during three years of mounting Russiagate allegations. Or I may exaggerate them. Even if I am right about Soviet-like practices in the United States, they are as yet only adumbrations, and certainly nothing as repressive as they once were in Russia.

New Cold War is more dangerous than the one the world survived – Stephen Cohen

And yet, ominous trends are not to be discounted and still less ignored. I have commented on them previously, on the official use of “informants” to infiltrate Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, for example, and such practices have now multiplied. Consider the following:

Soviet authorities, through the KGB, regularly charged and punished dissidents and other unacceptably independent citizens with linguistic versions of “collusion” and “contacts” with foreigners, particularly Americans. (Having inadvertently been the American in several cases, I can testify that the “contacts” were entirely casual, professional, or otherwise innocent.) Is something similar under way here? As the former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy has pointed out, to make allegations of Trump associates’ “collusion” is to question “everyone who had interacted with Russia in the last quarter-century.” In my case and those of not a few scholarly colleagues, it would mean in the last half-century, or nearly. Nor is this practice merely hypothetical or abstract.

The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence recently sent a letter to an American professor and public intellectual demanding that this person turn over “all communications [since January 2015] with Russian media organizations, their employees, representatives, or associates,” with “Russian persons or business interests,” “with or about US political campaigns or entities relating to Russia,” and “related to travel to Russia, and/or meetings, or discussions, or interactions that occurred during such travel.” We do not know how many such letters the Committee has sent, but this is not the only one. If this is not an un-American political inquisition, it is hard to say what would be. (It was also a common Soviet practice, though such “documents” were usually obtained by sudden police raids, of which there have recently been at least two in our own country, both related to Russiagate.)

‘Silicon Valley bureaucrats deciding who gets freedom of speech’: Jimmy Dore on Facebook censorshipIn this connection, Soviet authorities also regularly practiced selective prosecution, which is persecution intended to send a chilling signal to other would-be offenders. For example, in 1965, Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel were arrested for publishing their literary writings abroad under pseudonyms, an emerging practice the Kremlin wanted to stop. And in 1972, an important dissident figure, Pytor Yakir, was held in solitary confinement until he “broke” and signed a “confession,” even naming some of his associates, which greatly demoralized the dissident movement. Paul Manafort is no American dissident, literary or otherwise, and he well may be guilty of the financial misdeeds and tax evasion as charged. But he is facing, at nearly age 70, in effect a life sentence in prison and, through fines imposed, the bankruptcy of his family. We may reasonably ask: Is this selective prosecution/persecution? How many other hired US political operatives in foreign countries in recent years have been so audited and onerously prosecuted? Or has Manafort been singled out because he was once Trump’s campaign manager? We may also ask why a young Russian woman living in Washington, Maria Butina, was arrested and kept in solitary confinement until she confessed - that is, pleaded guilty. (She is still in prison.) Her offense? Publicly extolling the virtues of her native Russian government and advocating détente-like relations between Washington and Moscow without having registered as a foreign agent. Americans living in Russia frequently do the same on behalf of their country. Certainly, I have often done so. Are patriotism and promoting détente as an alternative to the new and more dangerous Cold War now a crime in the United States, or is the selective prosecution of Butina a response to Trump’s call for “cooperation with Russia”?

Now we have an even more alarming Soviet-like practice. Former acting head of the FBI  Andrew McCabe tells us that in 2017, he and other high officials discussed a way to remove President Trump from office. As Alan Dershowitz, a professor of constitutional law, remarked, they had in mind an “attempted coup d’état.” Which may remind students of Soviet history that two of its leaders were targets of a bureaucratic or administrative “coup”- Nikita Khrushchev twice, in 1957 and 1964, the latter being successful; and Gorbachev in August 1991, though perhaps several other plots against him may still be unknown. Khrushchev and Gorbachev were disruptors of the bureaucratic status quo and its entrenched interests - very much unlike President Trump, but disruptors nonetheless.

‘A disgrace to US, big part of Russia hoax’: Trump unloads on ex-acting FBI chief McCabe

Finally, at least for now, there is the role media censorship played in Soviet repression. To a knowing reader who could read “between the lines,” the Soviet press actually provided a lot of usable information. Equally important, though, was what it excluded as taboo—particularly news and other information that undermined the official narrative of current and historical events. (All this ended with Gorbachev’s introduction of glasnost in the late 1980s.) In the era of Russiagate, American mainstream media are practicing at least partial censorship by systematically excluding voices and other sources that directly challenge their orthodox narrative. There are many such malpractices in leading newspapers and on influential television programs, but they are the subject of another commentary.
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These examples remind us that we are also living in an age of blame -particularly blaming Russia for mishaps of our own making, for electoral outcomes and other unwelcome developments elsewhere in the world. Drawing attention to Soviet precedents is not to blame that long-gone nation state. Instead, we again need Walt Kelly’s cartoon philosopher Pogo, who told us decades ago, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

By Stephen F. Cohen


This article was originally published by The Nation. 
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Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nationcontributing editor, he is the author, most recently, of War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.

by Egon von Greyerz
Is a total collapse of the financial system next or will we see the globalists taking control of the world? Either way, the world is now at one of the most critical crossroads ever in history. Shakespeare expressed it eloquently in Julius Caesar:


There is a tide in the affairs of men.
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.


THE NOT SO BRIGHT FUTURE FOR THE WORLD
One of the brightest minds in finance, R.E. McMaster, has summarised the global situation as follows:

“The globalist New World Order could fall apart. First of all, all of the world’s governments today are socialist, a guarantee of failure.

• Moreover, debt globally has reached a tipping point (by 2022 at the latest). (A root meaning of the word “debt” is “death”.)
• Social Credit Red China could implode from all its excessive reckless debt and imperialistic over-extension.
• The un-elected elitist EU is already coming part with Italy, France, the UK, Poland and Hungary in revolt.
• The US Empire is self-destructing from military overstretch, bloated debt at all levels, and spoiled, childlike, take-offense-at-everything selfishness by identity groups and welfare recipients squabbling over the loot taken from productive citizens by the government, while billionaire oligarchic-run corporations pick them apart.
• Plus, nearly all governments are equally destructive cultural Marxist.
• Then there is the instability of the earth’s magnetic poles, its fast weakening magnetic field, the increasing numbers and intensity of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, plus solar instability, not to mention expensive and increasingly scarce energy.
• The risk of an internet shutdown.
• The risk of a population-exterminating epidemic (likely a virus, man-made), and the risk of a destructive global nuclear war.
• Mankind today, at least the mad narcissistic sociopathic and psychopathic Luciferian rulers, seem to have a comprehensive death wish. …”

It is hard to argue against many of these projections. R.E. McMaster is a moderate person with an immaculate 50 year track record.
It is possible that the elite is working hard on their globalist agenda to assume control of the world. If they achieve what they have set out, life on earth will be extremely unpleasant to say the least.  Also, there will be nowhere to escape.


A DISORDERLY RESET NEXTBut even the best plans can go badly wrong. The most likely spanner in the works for the elite will be a total collapse of the financial system. This would involve first a final round of money printing creating hyperinflation in most Western countries as well as in emerging markets. But this will have no effect as the world discovers that worthless pieces of paper or computer entries cannot create eternal prosperity.


After a brief hyperinflationary phase, we will see an implosion of the financial system when global debt and liabilities of at least $2 quadrillion currently, disappears into a black hole. As the debt implodes, so will all the bubble assets financed by the debt, including stocks, property and bonds.


So the world is not in the position to take the flood that leads to fortune. Sadly whatever current the world takes will lead to miseries. We are now in a LOSE – LOSE situation and it will be a question of the least painful outcome.


Since the world cannot choose which way to go, we must look at the most likely option. Personally I believe that a collapse of the financial system and the world economy is more likely than globalist control of the world. You could argue that the globalists will orchestrate the collapse and take advantage of the anarchy which will arise to take control. But I think that the coming disorderly reset of the world economy will be impossible to control by any individuals, state or military power.


A GLOBAL FIRE IS REQUIREDSo the coming years and decades will be horrific which ever path the world takes. A reset is totally necessary for the world to start the next growth phase. We need a global fire that burns the current system down to the ground. Only from that position can we get strong green shoots that will form the foundation for a healthy growth of the new world economy.


Michael Snyder recently wrote an article about life in Major Wester Cities called:


“Rats, Public Defecation And Open Drug Use:
Our Major Western Cities Are Becoming Uninhabitable Hellholes”


The advantage with the fire is that it will also destroy the decadence as well as the false values and false morals which have become rampant in the last few decades.


The suffering that we, our children and grandchildren will go through during this period of transition will be horrendous but sadly it will be necessary in order to give the world a chance to eventually take the right current.


DEUS EX MACHINA – THE ONLY SOLUTION?It is with no pleasure I discuss the above alternatives for the world. I obviously wish that the outcome of the mess we are in now could treat the world more gently. But I cannot see another realistic solution. Possibly that would be Deus ex Machina which I discussed many years ago in an article. This is from the old Greek plays when god was lowered down on the stage in a little machine or basket and solved all the problems. But unfortunately I think that this is a very unlikely solution to the problem we are in.


GOLD ON THE WAY TO NEW HIGHS IN ALL CURRENCIESSo let’s finish with some more uplifting news for the ones who understand the importance of wealth preservation or insurance against the current risks in the world economy and financial system. In my article last week I talked about the Gold Maginot Line. Gold in US dollars has not yet broken the important $1,350 line but is now on its way, finishing at $1,320 last Friday.
Important moves often start in the periphery. As the chart below shows, Gold in Swiss franc for example broke out of the same line last week and is now on its way to new highs.


Gold is now breaking out to new all time highs in a number of currencies including the Swedish and Norwegian Krona, Canadian and Australian dollars and many more. In Venezuela gold was 200 Bolivars in 2000 and now it is 327 million. In Argentina gold was 270 pesos in 2000 and now it is 50,000. We are likely to see these hyperinflationary levels in the West in coming years.


Subscribe
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As I discussed in my article last week, the time when gold can be bought at current levels is quickly coming to an end. And we might get to the point when gold, due to shortages, cannot be bought at any level.


Finally, remember that gold is the only currency that has survived in history. A 5,000 year old tradition will not change whatever governments or globalists try to achieve.


Gold is not just a store of value, it is also beautiful. Below are 3 pictures of gold, dating back 4,500 to 6,250 years, from Timothy Green’s book “The Ages of Gold”


The bull below is 6,250 years old. It is a symbol of gold being both timeless and eternal as the only money which has survived throughout history.


HISTORY’S BIGGEST BEAR MARKET IN FIAT MONEY AND BULL MARKET IN ETERNAL MONEY OR GOLD IS ABOUT TO START.


YOU WILL IGNORE IT AT YOUR PERIL


Egon von Greyerz
Founder and Managing Partner
Matterhorn Asset Management
Zurich, Switzerland
Phone: +41 44 213 62 45

Matterhorn Asset Management’s global client base strategically stores an important part of their wealth in Switzerland in physical gold and silver outside the banking system. Matterhorn Asset Management is pleased to deliver a unique and exceptional service to our highly esteemed wealth preservation clientele in over 60 countries.

GoldSwitzerland.com
Contact Us

Articles may be republished if full credits are given with a link to GoldSwitzerland.com.

By Victor Davis Hanson|  February 17th, 2019

The illegal effort to destroy the 2016 Trump campaign by Hillary Clinton campaign’s use of funds to create, disseminate among court media, and then salt among high Obama administration officials, a fabricated, opposition smear dossier failed.
So has the second special prosecutor phase of the coup to abort the Trump presidency failed. There are many elements to what in time likely will become recognized as the greatest scandal in American political history, marking the first occasion in which U.S. government bureaucrats sought to overturn an election and to remove a sitting U.S. president.

Preparing the Battlefield

No palace coup can take place without the perception of popular anger at a president.
The deep state is by nature cowardly. It does not move unless it feels it can disguise its subterranean efforts or that, if revealed, those efforts will be seen as popular and necessary—as expressed in tell-all book titles such as fired FBI Directors James Comey’s Higher Loyalty or in disgraced Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe’s psychodramatic The Threat.

In candidate and President Trump’s case that prepping of the battlefield translated into a coordinated effort among the media, political progressives and celebrities to so demonize Trump that his imminent removal likely would appear a relief to the people. Anything was justified that led to that end.

All through the 2016 campaign and during the first two years of the Trump presidency the media’s treatment, according to liberal adjudicators of press coverage, ran about 90 percent negative toward Trump—a landmark bias that continues today.

Journalists themselves consulted with the Clinton campaign to coordinate attacks. From the Wikileaks trove, journalistic grandees such as John Harwood, Mark Leibovich, Dana Milbank, and Glenn Thrush often communicated (and even post factum were unapologetic about doing so) with John Podesta’s staff to construct various anti-Trump themes and have the Clinton campaign review or even audit them in advance.

Some contract “journalists” apparently were paid directly by Fusion GPS—created by former reporters Glen Simpson of the Wall Street Journal and Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post—to spread lurid stories from the dossier. Others more refined like Christiane Amanpour and James Rutenberg had argued for a new journalistic ethos that partisan coverage was certainly justified in the age of Trump, given his assumed existential threat to The Truth. Or as Rutenberg put it in 2016: “If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable. But the question that everyone is grappling with is: Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?”

I suppose Rutenberg never considered that half the country might have considered the Hillary Clinton presidency “potentially dangerous,” and yet did not expect the evening news, in 90 percent of its coverage, to reflect such suspicions.

The Democratic National Committee’s appendages often helped to massage CNN news coverage—such as Donna Brazile’s primary debate tip-off to the Clinton campaign or CNN’s consultation with the DNC about forming talking points for a scheduled Trump interview.

So-called “bombshell,” “watershed,” “turning-point,” and “walls closing in” fake news aired in 24-hour news bulletin cycles. The media went from fabrications about Trump’s supposed removal of the bust of Martin Luther King, Jr. from the Oval Office, to the mythologies in the Steele dossier, to lies about the Trump Tower meeting, to assurances that Michael Cohen would testify to Trump’s suborning perjury, and on and on.

CNN soon proved that it is no longer a news organization at all—as reporters like Gloria Borger, Chris Cuomo, Eric Lichtblau, Manu Raju, Brian Rokus, Jake Tapper, Jeff Zeleny, and teams such as Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, and Marshall Cohen as well as Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, and Lex Harris all trafficked in false rumors and unproven gossip detrimental to Trump, while hosts and guest hosts such as Reza Aslan, the late Anthony Bourdain, and Anderson Cooper stooped to obscenity and grossness to attack Trump.
Both politicos and celebrities tried to drive Trump’s numbers down to facilitate some sort of popular ratification for his removal. Hollywood and the coastal corridor punditry exhausted public expressions of assassinating or injuring the president, as the likes of Jim Carrey, Johnny Depp, Robert de Niro, Peter Fonda, Kathy Griffin, Madonna, Snoop Dogg, and a host of others vied rhetorically to slice apart, shoot, beat up, cage, behead, and blow up the president.

Left wing social media and mainstream journalism spread sensational lies about supposed maniacal Trump supporters in MAGA hats. They constructed fantasies that veritable white racists were now liberated to run amuck insulting and beating up people of color as they taunted the poor and victimized minorities with vicious Trump sloganeering—even as the Covington farce and now the even more embarrassing Jussie Smollett charade evaporated without apologies from the media and progressive merchants of such hate.
At the same time, liberal attorneys, foundations, Democratic politicians, and progressive activists variously sued to overturn the election on false charges of rigged voting machines. They sought to subvert the Electoral College. They introduced articles of impeachment. They sued to remove Trump under the Emoluments Clause. They attempted to invoke the 25th Amendment. And they even resurrected the ossified Logan Act—before focusing on the appointment of a special counsel to discredit the Trump presidency. Waiting for the 2020 election was seen as too quaint.

Weaponizing the Deep State

During the 2016 election, the Obama Department of Justice warped the Clinton email scandal investigation, from Bill Clinton’s secret meeting on an airport tarmac with Attorney General Loretta Lynch, to unethical immunity given to the unveracious Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, to James Comey’s convoluted predetermined treatment of “likely winner” Clinton, and to DOJ’s Bruce Ohr’s flagrant conflict of interests in relation to Fusion GPS.

About a dozen FBI and DOJ grandees have now resigned, retired, been fired, or reassigned for unethical and likely illegal behavior—and yet have not faced criminal indictments. The reputation of the FBI as venerable agency is all but wrecked. Its administrators variously have libeled the Trump voters, expressed hatred for Trump, talked of “insurance policies” in ending the Trump candidacy, and inserted informants into the Trump campaign.

The former Obama directors of the CIA and National Intelligence, with security clearances intact, hit the television airways as paid “consultants” and almost daily accused the sitting president of Russian collusion and treason—without cross-examination or notice that both previously had lied under oath to Congress (and did so without subsequent legal exposure), and both were likely knee-deep in the dissemination of the Steele dossier among Obama administration officials.

John Brennan’s CIA likely helped to spread the Fusion GPS dossier among elected and administrative state officials. Some in the NSC in massive and unprecedented fashion requested the unmasking of surveilled names of Trump subordinates, and then illegally leaked them to the press.

The FISA courts, fairly or not, are now mostly discredited, given they either were willingly or naively hoodwinked by FBI and DOJ officials who submitted as chief evidence for surveillance on American citizens, an unverified dossier—without disclosure that the bought campaign hit-piece was paid for by Hillary Clinton, authored by a discredited has-been British agent, relied on murky purchased Russian sources, and used in circular fashion to seed news accounts of supposed Trump misbehavior.

The Mueller Investigation

The Crown Jewel in the coup was the appointment of special counsel Robert Muller to discover supposed 2016 Trump-Russian election collusion. Never has any special investigation been so ill-starred from its conception.

Mueller’s appointment was a result of his own friend James Comey’s bitter stunt of releasing secret, confidential and even classified memos of presidential conversations. Acting DOJ Attorney Rod Rosenstein appointed a former colleague Mueller—although as a veteran himself of the Clinton email scandal investigations and the FISA fraudulent writ requests, Rosenstein was far more conflicted than was the recused Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Mueller then packed his investigative team with lots of Clinton donors and partisans, some of whom had legally represented Clinton subordinates and even the Clinton Foundation or voiced support for anti-Trump movements.

Mueller himself and Andrew Weissmann have had a long record of investigatory and prosecutorial overreach that had on occasion resulted in government liability and court mandated federal restitution. In such polarized times, neither should have involved in such an investigation. Two subordinate FBI investigators were caught earlier on conducting an affair over their FBI-issued cell phones, and during the election cycle they slurred the object of their subsequent investigation, ridiculed Trump voters, and bragged that Trump would never be elected. Mueller later staggered, and then hid for weeks the reasons for, their respective firings.

The team soon discovered there was no Trump-Russian 2016 election collusion—and yet went ahead to leverage Trump campaign subordinates on process crimes in hopes of finding some culpability in Trump’s past 50-year business, legal, and tax records. The point was not to find who colluded with whom (if it had been, then Hillary Clinton would be now indicted for illegally hiring with campaign funds a foreign national to buy foreign fabrications to discredit her opponent), but to find the proper mechanism to destroy the presumed guilty Donald Trump.

The Mueller probe has now failed in that gambit of proving “collusion” (as even progressive investigative reporters and some FBI investigators had predicted), but succeeded brilliantly in two ways.

The “counterintelligence” investigation subverted two years of the Trump presidency by constant leaks that Trump soon would be indicted, jailed, disgraced, or impeached. As a result, Trump’s stellar economic and foreign policy record would never earn fifty percent of public support.

Second, Mueller’s preemptive attacks offered an effective offensive defense for the likely felonious behavior of John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok, and a host of others. While the Mueller lawyers threatened to destroy the lives of bit players like Jerome Corsi, George Papadopoulos, and Roger Stone, they de facto provided exemption to a host of the Washington hierarchy who had lied under oath, obstructed justice, illegally leaked to the press, unmasked and leaked names of surveilled Americans, and misled federal courts under the guise of a “higher loyalty” to the cause of destroying Donald J. Trump.

The Palace Coup

All of the above came to a head with the firing of the chronic leaker FBI Director James Comey (who would lie to the president about his not being a target of an FBI investigation, lie to House investigatory committees by pleading amnesia and ignorance on 245 occasions, and repeatedly lie to his own FBI bureaucrats).

In May 2017, acting FBI director Andrew McCabe took over from the fired Comey. His candidate wife recently had been a recipient of huge Clinton-related campaign PAC donations shortly before he began investigating the Clinton email scandal. McCabe would soon be cited by the Inspector General for lying to federal investigators on numerous occasions—cynically stooping even to lie to his own New York FBI subordinates to invest scarce resources to hunt for their own nonexistent leaks as a mechanism for disguising his own quite real and illegal leaking.

The newly promoted McCabe apparently felt that it was his moment to become famous for taking out a now President Trump. Thus, he assembled a FBI and DOJ cadre to open a counterintelligence investigation of the sitting president on no other grounds but the fumes of an evaporating Clinton opposition dossier and perceived anger among the FBI that their director had just been fired. In addition, apparently now posing as Andrew McCabe, MD, he informally head counted how many of Trump’s own cabinet members could be convinced by McCabe’s own apparent medical expertise to help remove the president on grounds of physical and mental incapacity under the 25th Amendment. This was an attempted, albeit pathetic, coup against an elected president and the first really in the history of the United States.

At one point, McCabe claims that the acting Attorney General of the United States Rod Rosenstein volunteered to wear a wire to entrap his boss President Trump—in the manner of Trump’s own attorney Michael Cohen’s entrapment of Trump, in the manner of James Comey taking entrapment notes on confidential Trump one-on-one meetings and leaking them to the press, and in the manner of the Department of Justice surveilling Trump subordinates through FISA and other court authorizations.
McCabe was iconic of an utterly corrupt FBI Washington hierarchy, which we now know from the behavior of its disgraced and departed leadership. They posed as patriotic scouts, but in reality proved themselves arrogant, smug, and incompetent. They harbored such a sense of superiority that they were convinced they could act outside the law in reifying an “insurance policy” that would end the Trump presidency.

The thinking of the conspirators initially had been predicated on three assumptions thematic during this three-year long government effort to destroy Trump:

One, during 2016, Hillary Clinton would certainly win the election and FBI and DOJ unethical and illegal behavior would be forgotten if not rewarded, given the Clintons’ own signature transgressions and proven indifference to the law;

Two, Trump was so controversial and the fabricated dossier was so vile and salacious, that seeded rumors of Trump’s faked perversity gave them de facto exemptions to do whatever they damned pleased;

Three, Trump’s low polls, his controversial reset of American policy, and the general contempt in which he was held by the bipartisan coastal elite, celebrities, and the deep state, meant that even illegal means to continue the campaign-era effort to destroy Trump and now abort his presidency were felt to be moral and heroic acts without legal consequences, and the media would see the conspirators as heroes.

In sum, the Left and the administrative state, in concert with the media, after failing to stop the Trump campaign, regrouped. They ginned up a media-induced public hysteria, with the residue of the Hillary Clinton campaign’s illegal opposition research, and manipulated it to put in place a special counsel, stocked with partisans.

Then, not thugs in sunglasses and epaulettes, not oligarchs in private jets, not shaggy would-be Marxists, but sanctimonious arrogant bureaucrats in suits and ties used their government agencies to seek to overturn the 2016 election, abort a presidency, and subvert the U.S. Constitution. And they did all that and more on the premise that they were our moral superiors and had uniquely divine rights to destroy a presidency that they loathed.

Shame on all these failed conspirators and their abettors, and may these immoral people finally earn a long deserved legal and moral reckoning.

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About the Author: Victor Davis Hanson

Victor Davis Hanson is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).