Earlier this week, historian Michael Ledeen wrote a column entitled, “Is Dianne Feinstein the Most Corrupt Senator in the United States?” As Americans have acknowledged, the bar is exceedingly low. At the very least, Feinstein is a sleazy hack. But far more important, the California Democrat is a sleazy hack who has benefitted from an egregious and enduring double standard of accountability. How many Republicans could have employed a Chinese spy — for 20 years, no less — and had that relationship so casually dismissed by the mainstream media and the FBI?

In a nation roiled by an almost two-year investigation of Russian collusion, one might think the former chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would merit more scrutiny for employing a chauffeur/office staffer who attended Chinese Consulate functions for Feinstein, and had “been reporting back to China’s Ministry of State Security for well over a decade before he was caught in 2013, according to the FBI,” writes investigative columnist Paul Sperry. Nonetheless, the FBI apparently concluded the still-unnamed individual hadn’t revealed anything of substance. “They interviewed him, and Dianne forced him to retire, and that was the end of it,” stated an anonymous source to the San Francisco Chronicle.

The FBI’s disinterest in the two-decade relationship doesn’t sit well with Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN). In August, he sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking for a briefing on the matter because believes it is “imperative that those with access to this information exercise extreme diligence in guarding material that, if exposed, would present a danger to the national security of the United States.”

As the FBI’s “investigations” of Feinstein and Hillary Clinton indicate, “extreme diligence” is sometimes defined by political affiliation.

And nothing makes it clearer than the FBI’s wholly different approach to the allegations leveled against President Donald Trump. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes illuminates the aforementioned double standard in no uncertain terms. “Providing a defensive briefing, like the one given to Senator Feinstein, is a typical response to these kinds of situations,” he asserted. “The refusal to give the Trump campaign a defensive briefing, and instead opening a sprawling counter-intelligence investigation of American citizens, is one of many alarming ways that intelligence leaders drastically diverged from normal procedures in their Trump campaign investigation.”

Nunes made that statement on Aug 7. This week we learned that “divergence” was far worse: During her closed-door congressional hearing, former FBI agent and serial texter Lisa Page revealed the FBI couldn’t prove Russian collusion after a nine-month investigation beginning in the summer of 2016.

In other words, the DOJ, courtesy of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, initiated the special counsel investigation without anything to investigate.

And who has helped drive that investigation? In April, a declassified congressional report revealed former Feinstein aide Daniel Jones “hired Fusion GPS and Christopher Steele after the 2016 election to push the anti-Trump Russian collusion narrative,” The Federalist’s Sean Davis reported. Jones runs an investigation entity called the Penn Quarter Group (PQG), and in 2017 he told the FBI he had raised $50 million from “7 to 10 wealthy donors located primarily in New York and California” to “continue exposing Russian interference” in the 2016 election.

In a harbinger of her latest effort to shape an agenda, Feinstein unilaterally released Fusion GPS co-founder Glenn Simpson’s testimony given to the Senate Judiciary Committee in August of 2017 — while the Committee was still trying to secure testimony from other witnesses. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) applauded the move, insisting it “advances the American people’s right and need to know the full truth.”

Not exactly. Feinstein never disclosed that Jones was directing Fusion GPS’s efforts to undermine the Trump administration. As Davis astutely noted last February, Jones’ effort was an attempt to “retroactively validate” the Steele dossier. Feinstein abetted that effort by attempting to undermine an ongoing investigation.

This time she deliberately waited until the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh were complete before announcing she had turned over a letter from accuser Christine Blasey Ford to the FBI, while insisting she was honoring Ford’s then-“strongly requested” confidentiality.

Even the left-wing San Francisco Chronicle couldn’t stomach such calculating disingenuousness. Feinstein has been around long enough to know “her opaque statement guaranteed that the contents of the letter … would be pursued and publicized in short order. And they were,” the paper stated.

Feinstein’s also been around long enough to have quite a track record with regard to China. “For the last 40 years, no politician in America has arguably maintained a deeper, more longstanding and friendlier relationship with China, at the highest levels of its ruling Communist Party, than Feinstein,” reveals columnist Ben Weingarten. “It dates back to the opening of U.S.-Chinese diplomatic relations in 1979.”

While mayor of San Francisco, Feinstein established a “sister city” relationship with Shanghai and developed an enduring relationship with Shanghai Mayor Jiang Zemin. “Just as Feinstein rose to a prominent position in foreign affairs and national security in the U.S. Senate, first on the Foreign Relations Committee and later as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Jiang rose to the top of Chinese leadership, serving as chairman of the Central Military Commission, general secretary of the CCP, and president of the People’s Republic of China (PRC),” Weingarten explains.

Weingarten further notes that Feinstein ignored all the human-rights atrocities precipitated by Jiang, maintaining their friendship. Feinstein also cultivated corporate relationships with China, including one with Shanghai Pacific Partners, where her mega-millionaire investor husband, Richard C. Blum, served as a director. In 1993, Feinstein championed continued trading with China while Blum was attempting to raise $150 million for investors (including himself) for a variety of projects.

In 1996 — soon after the aforementioned spy began working for Feinstein — the FBI warned her in a classified brief that China might try to exert its influence on her when she sat on East Asian and Pacific affairs subcommittee of the Senate’s Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees U.S.-China relations. During the DOJ’s 1996 investigation of Clinton campaign funding, “DiFi” was forced to return more than $12,000 received from Chinese bag-man John Huang, who was ultimately convicted of campaign-finance fraud.

Feinstein remained such a champion of China that she asserted moral equivalency between China’s 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre and the 1970 Kent State shootings, chiding both nations equally for their human-rights shortcomings.

Sperry gets to the bottom line. “Feinstein, still among the Senate’s most influential China doves, travels to China each year,” he writes, further noting the relationship greatly benefited her husband and has made her “one of the richest members in Congress.”

On Tuesday, Feinstein conceded that she “can’t say everything’s truthful” with regard to Ford’s accusations. If this were about a genuine search for the truth, Feinstein would have made Ford’s accusations known during the Senate Committee hearings. Now Feinstein insists Monday’s scheduled hearing must be delayed so the FBI can investigate a 36-year-old allegation that doesn’t involve a federal crime, and falls outside the applicable statute of limitations.

So, is Feinstein the most corrupt senator in America? At the very least, the woman who has held a Senate seat since 1992 epitomizes the need for term limits.