Editor’s note: Andrew C. McCarthy’s new book is “Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.” This is the first in a series of excerpts.

There really was a collusion plot. It really did target our election system. It absolutely sought to usurp our capacity for self-determination. It was just not the collusion you’ve been told about for nearly three years. It was not “Donald Trump’s collusion with Russia.”

Here is the real collusion scheme: In 2016, the incumbent Democratic administration of President Barack Obama put the awesome powers of the United States government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, the Democratic Party, and the progressive Beltway establishment.

This scheme had two parts: Plan A, the objective; and Plan B, a fail-safe strategy in case Plan A imploded — which all the smartest people were supremely confident would never, ever happen ... which is why you could bet the ranch that it would.

Plan A was to get Clinton elected president of the United States. This required exonerating her, at least ostensibly, from well-founded allegations of her felonious and politically disqualifying actions.

CLICK HERE TO GET OUR OPINION NEWSLETTER

Plan B was the insurance policy: an investigation that Donald Trump, in the highly unlikely event he was elected, would be powerless to shut down. An investigation that would simultaneously monitor and taint him. An investigation that internalized Clinton-campaign-generated opposition research, limning Trump and his campaign as complicit in Russian espionage.

An investigation that would hunt for a crime under the guise of counterintelligence, build an impeachment case under the guise of hunting for a crime, and seek to make Trump not reelectable under the guise of building an impeachment case.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP

Upon becoming President Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton improperly set up a private, non-secure system for email communications. It featured her own personal server, stored in her home and, later, maintained by a private contractor.

Secretary Clinton used this private email system for all of her official State Department communications, notwithstanding that doing so (a) violated government regulations (which, as the department head, she was responsible for enforcing); (b) violated governmental record-keeping and record-production obligations imposed by federal law; and (c) made it inevitable — due to the nature of her responsibilities — that streams of classified information would flow through and be stored in the non-secure system.

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE READING THIS COLUMN IN THE NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE BY ANDREW MCCARTHY