The big news of Thursday was not whether or not there will be a government shutdown (yawn) or whether the wall will or will not be built (it will — eventually) or even that AOC betrayed the citizens of New York by costing them 25,000 Amazon jobs (hey, she’s a socialist).

The big news in what was a relatively big news day was made by fired Acting Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe in snippets from a forthcoming interview on 60 Minutes. McCabe — the man who somehow couldn’t recall what the words “insurance policy” referred to in one of his texts — was promoting a new book he somehow managed to write despite his faulty memory. In the midst of this, he confirmed what many of us long suspected — that he and other major officials (Rod Rosenstein, etc.) of the FBI and the DOJ contemplated, even attempted to some degree, a coup d’état against the president of the United States.

Now that is one for the history books and something we should all contemplate — a collection of unelected, self-righteous bureaucrats trying to subvert the democratic decision of the voters of the United States of America. They did it better in the Soviet Union. Beria, et al., at least knew how to follow through on their threats.

Nevertheless this crew went so far as to discuss which cabinet members would ally with them in their cause, which used as its basis the 25th Amendment, an adjustment to the Constitution formulated after Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and that was meant to deal with similar situations. In the case of the coup plotters, I suppose, they deemed Trump to be crazy — something Alan Dershowitz and others insist is not remotely covered by the amendment, but that doesn’t seem to have bothered McCabe and Rosenstein. You could call that projection but it’s worse. It’s power-hungry people justifying their own evil ends. Kind of sick, actually.

And monumentally dumb as well. McCabe, putatively in charge of counter-intelligence, left a digital trail most nine-year-olds would think twice about. Moreover, even in the 60 Minutes interview, he appears to misunderstand Russia completely. He still insists the aim of their hackers was to get Trump elected. (Even Rosenstein denied this over a year ago.). The KGB/FSB would not have wasted its time on anything so unlikely. They read the same Nate Silver, etc. polls that we did. Their intention, as it has been since the czars (see Pacepa’s Disinformation), was to sow confusion, to screw things up and set us against each other. They did a helluva good job of it, if McCabe is any indication. (That he and Rosenstein are at odds about what happened is just the tiniest example of this discord. The MSM has been doing the Russians’ work for them and then some. CNN, especially, should be paid overtime by Putin.)

If Hollywood were making decent movies these days, there’s a great film to be made about the entire Russia Probe in all its aspects — kind of like The Lives of Others, but with more black humor (the FBI as a group of plotting apparatchiks). It would have been great fodder for a master of dark comedy and sinister, self-interested manipulation like Joe Mankiewicz (All About Eve). But of course to do this you would have to be ruthlessly truthful, something Hollywood could not be less interested in now.

The real question is, however, how could this happen in this democratic republic? If a thorough and complete exposition is not done of every aspect of this episode wherever it ends up, if the air is not fully cleared and miscreants punished, half the country will never, repeat never, trust the FBI or the DOJ again. That would be a catastrophe for the nation.

This is something for Michael Horowitz, the inspector general, to think about seriously. His last report was frustrating. He was like a quarterback who brought his team to the two yard line and then fumbled the ball, in his case seemingly almost deliberately. He laid bare many of the calumnies of the Clinton email investigation and then drew a false conclusion, relying on a far more trivial investigation of Alberto Gonzales to let Clinton slither away.

This second report that is expected this summer to include FISA warrants, spying on U.S. citizens, etc., is yet more important. Hillary Clinton may not have gotten her just deserts, but, with luck, she’s not going to bother us anymore. (I said — with luck.) The Federal Bureau of Investigation is currently the most important police agency not only in our country, but in the world. We’re stuck with it, like it or not. Something must be done.

Roger L. Simon – co-founder and CEO Emeritus of PJ Media – an award-winning novelist and Academy Award-nominated screenwriter.