How husbands and wives figure in the latest government scandal revelations

There's a nice post on Thread Reader identifying the man at the center of all the Trump-Russia-dossier crap: Bill Priestap, Peter Strzok's boss and James Comey's confidant. He knows everything and would have made any decision to pay for the Fusion GPS dossier. Oddly, he has escaped media scrutiny so far. The one thing they sort of miss on is his wife, Sabina Menschel, who is not just some consultant, but the current head of the D.C. office of Nardello & Co. That's the top private-eye firm in the Beltway.

So the man the FBI has keeping all its secrets is married to the top private snoop in Washington. It would be revealing, no doubt, to see what Democratic-affiliated law firms and media shops in D.C. use Nardello. Let's hope congressional investigators are looking into this. Ms. Menshel, by the way, is the daughter and niece of Goldman Sachs zillionaire brothers Richard and Robert Menshel, big-time Democrat donors. A long time ago, a friend of mine who once worked in the intel community in D.C. told me all the agencies were just absolute cesspools of nepotism, and pretty much everybody advanced by playing leap-frog along with a spouse through the system. Use your connections to get your wife a better slot somewhere in the alphabet soup, then she does the same for you. A few detours on the way to congressional staffs, or well connected private law and media firms, can be part of the track as well. That's how we got everyone from Bruce and Nellie Ohr to Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson. No surprise at all that Hillary Clinton's attorney is the super-connected Beth Wilkinson, married to NBC's David Gregory and an alumna of the Web Hubbell DOJ and the Jamie Gorelick Fannie Mae – you know, the same people in James Comey's FBI. Peter Strzok may have a variation on the game, using his mistress Lisa Page as his ladder-climbing pal in the DOJ. The current situation was made worse by the poor job George W. Bush did in bringing his people to the DOJ. You may remember the hassle he got with every U.S. attorney he tried to replace and with every non-Ivy League lawyer he wanted in Washington. Having Alberto Gonzales as attorney general didn't help. So the normal partisan house-cleaning and turnover that should have happened in eight years of Bush did not occur. We also have the swamp fighting furiously for every important federal job to be credentialed and not made "political." What sort of person benefits from that? The Lois Lerners of the world – connected East Coast liberals. There are 80,000 IRS employees but only two appointed by the president. It is an irony worthy of a Charles Murray book that the liberal D.C. Democrats, who have done so much to destroy the American family in general, have made family ties their secret weapon for staying power in Washington, no matter who wins the elections. Frank Friday is an attorney in Louisville, Ky.