Drunk on the ruling class’s praise of her subversive hackery at the Justice Department, Sally Yates evidently conceives of herself as a very august presence in American public life. How else to explain her state of the union-style address in USA Today this week?

The piece is full of third-rate partisan cant dressed up as deep thoughts on “who we are as a country.” Yates has taken it upon herself to inform us of America’s “core values.” Full of the usual jargon about “inflection points” and laughable liberal sanctimony (“our country’s strength comes from honoring, not weaponizing, the diversity that springs from being a nation of Native Americans and immigrants of different races, religions and nationalities”), the piece is only notable for its audacious hypocrisy on the subject of “apolitical law enforcement.”

It is hard to imagine a less credible commentator on this subject than Yates. She deserves a special place in the annals of wholly politicized law enforcement. Were it not for the safety net the media and ruling class held beneath her, the political high-wire act she performed during the transition period after the election would have been unfathomable. Yates was an Obama appointee whose husband had run for the Democrats and donated to the Democrats. Obviously ambitious, she was rooting for Trump’s loss and hoping for a plum position in the Hillary administration. That desire thwarted, she then set to work shafting the incoming administration. First, she joined forces with other embittered Obama holdovers and deep-state subversives to entrap Michael Flynn and criminally leak details of the entrapment to the media. Then, out of nothing more than ideological pique, she told the entire Justice Department to block the president on his manifestly constitutional travel ban that even a wobbly Supreme Court has upheld. As acts of political presumption go, those couldn’t rank higher.

Yet she presents herself in the USA Today column as a great exponent of disinterested justice. Using the same innocent, Eddie Haskell-like tone that she exhibited during her hearing before Congress, she writes:

The rule of law depends not only on things that are written down, but also on important traditions and norms, such as apolitical law enforcement. That’s why Democratic and Republican administrations alike, at least since Watergate, have honored that the rule of law requires a strict separation between the Justice Department and the White House on criminal cases and investigations. This wall of separation is what ensures the public can have confidence that the criminal process is not being used as a sword to go after one’s political enemies or as a shield to protect those in power. It’s what separates us from an autocracy.

Is she kidding? The Obama White House and Obama Justice Department jumped over that wall together to nail incoming Trump officials. She is not arguing against autocracy but for it — the autocracy of an entrenched liberal ruling class that fearing its lost privileges pulled out all the stops to sabotage a president it deemed “illegitimate.”

Who elected Sally Yates? Her presumption rested entirely upon the undemocratic conceits of an elite that deludes itself into thinking that the “rule of law” is synonymous with its appetite for power. The propagandists in the media work overtime to make the elite’s power grabs look respectable, but they are no different than those of third-world autocrats. The political espionage of the Obama administration against the incoming Trump administration is the stuff of banana republics.

Yates wasn’t vindicating any law that has ever been enforced but simply taking out a political opponent. Anybody who thinks she is “apolitical” should take a look at her Twitter account, which seems to grow more sloppily partisan as her giddiness at all the praise she receives from the elite grows. At this point, it might as well be Rachel Maddow’s. It is full of denunciations of Trump as “shamelessly unpatriotic,” with a lot of babble about his “contempt” for the Constitution and “indifference” to the truth while citing examples that prove neither. In one tweet, she says Trump “embraces Putin again.” Is this the same Yates, who at her most unctuous and officious, claimed that she had to entrap Flynn because she was so, so worried that the Russians might “blackmail” him? Why would they have needed to, if, as she insinuates, Trump and Russia were acting as one?

Like so many other ruling-class darlings, Yates puts on the halo of “independence” in order to advance the most partisan goals. Listening to her thoughts on “apolitical law enforcement” is like listening to Obama’s post-presidential speeches on civility in which he pretends to be giving advice to “both sides of the aisle” when in reality he is only rebuking one of them, the Republicans dumb enough to disarm as Dems are slitting their throats. All of this pompous chatter is designed not to save America from autocracy but to enshrine one that liberals see as their sacred right.