There is an old expression in power politics: If you are going to kill the king, you had better kill the king. This figure of speech in essence means that if a cabal of coup plotters plans to remove an extremely powerful leader of a country, they had better do so with the knowledge that if they fail in their attempt, the retribution they face will be severe, crushing and irredeemable. Those who sought to destroy Donald Trump failed. And they failed spectacularly. Now I believe they are going to face a retribution as deserving as those who would seek to kill a king. The question that most fascinates me is: Why would this cabal of anti-Trump plotters risk everything - their reputations, their fortunes and possibly even their freedom - to subvert an American presidential election and then a presidency itself?

I wrote in these pages two months ago that our country is facing the worst political crisis since at least the Civil War. However, today’s traitors were arguably worse than those ages past because they used the technological resources and agencies of the federal government itself to spy on and entrap members of the presidential campaign of the candidate they did not like and sought to undermine it covertly from within under the color of law. They went so far as to use our foreign intelligence apparatus - the CIA - to create fake “intelligence” which was injected into our domestic national security apparatus - the FBI - to create a fraudulently predicated “counterintelligence investigation.” The evidence indicates that they even colluded with agents of our allied powers - Britain, Australia and perhaps others - in this effort.

In that same article I indicated that this situation cannot remain unaddressed. And that it is up to one person, Attorney General William Barr, to rectify what is an existential threat to America’s survival as a viable Republic.

Based on his statements before Congress, I now believe that Attorney General Barr is going to do exactly that. And I believe that the Democratic Party and the NeverTrump Republicans also recognize that Mr. Barr’s comments are momentous. When Attorney General Barr said that he is “working to try to reconstruct” the beginnings of the Trump-Russia counterintelligence investigation, he was sending up a signal flare. And the Democrats and NeverTrumpers went into hysterics, as evidenced by their unrelenting attacks on Mr. Barr and even their vote to hold him in contempt for doing what the law requires him to do in not releasing an entirely unredacted version of the Mueller Report. They are terrified. And with good reason. It’s the same reason that Benedict Arnold was no doubt terrified as he fled Washington’s forces following his betrayal of America.

But the question recurs frequently in my mind: Why would people who have reached the pinnacle of success personally, professionally, reputationally, and financially - at least as measured by most Americans’ metrics of success - be willing to throw all that away in order to ensure that a person they personally did not like was not elected president?

Putting aside for the moment questions of patriotism and obeying oaths to the Constitution they swore to uphold, why would a person like Bruce Ohr throw away all of his hard-earned success as an American? Bruce Ohr was a graduate of Harvard College majoring in physics, who opted to enter Harvard Law School and pursue a law enforcement career. Bruce rose to the highest echelons of the Department of Justice as Associate Deputy Attorney General. His father, Sekyu Michael Ohr, was a physicist who worked on the US nuclear program. Bruce’s wife, Nellie Hauke Ohr, also deeply implicated in the anti-Trump plot, was a Russian history expert who received a degree from Harvard in Russian literature, a PhD from Stanford University in Russian history, and would go on to become a professor at Vasser College. This is a high-achieving family.

James Comey, a graduate of William and Mary and the University of Chicago Law School would rise to become Deputy Attorney General under President George W. Bush, General Counsel of Lockheed Martin Corporation, and then Director of the FBI. He would earn millions (with a reported net worth of $15 million or more) and live in a posh multi-million dollar estate in Martha Stewart’s swanky neighborhood in Connecticut.

I could go on, but the point is that all the people engaged in the subversion of our country would be considered the crème de la crème of American society. Yet they risked it all to avert Donald Trump’s election. What could possibly be the reason?

A fascinating new book called The Red Thread, by Diana West, a leading expert on the history of American communism, offers some intriguing insights into the anti-Trump conspiracy and suggests a possible answer. Did you know that James Comey described himself as a Communist when he was in college? Although he claimed to have “moved on” from his college politics, he would forever subscribe to the teachings and philosophy of Socialist theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Comey based his college thesis on a study of Niebuhr, and approvingly wrote: “The Christian in politics must be willing to transgress any purely Christian ethic. He must be willing to sin in the name of justice.”

In other words, Comey was saying that the ends justify the means -- that a person can take it upon himself to break the law if his ultimate goal is “right”, in his own mind. This of course, is precisely the opposite of how our society is supposed to function.

West informs us that John Brennan, who voted for the Communist Party USA candidate for president, Gus Hall, in 1976 was, according to former CIA chief of station Brad Johnson, “the target of a successful Saudi intelligence operation to convert him to Islam during Brennan’s stint, circa 1996, as CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.”

Ms. West teases out other highly interesting, and disturbing, facts about many of the anti-Trump conspiracy players. But more importantly, she lays out a larger framework in which to view the philosophical drivers of many of the conspirators, who fall into the Marxist/globalist/collectivist political camp. This is in direct opposition to the capitalist/nationalist/individualistic political camp led by Donald Trump. Trump was anathema to these individuals because he represented an existential threat to the globalist enterprise which has been so long in the making.

Our country came perilously close to having its fundamental character altered, perhaps permanently, in the 2016 election. It is now imperative that Attorney General Barr conduct a thorough, sweeping investigation to understand all the crimes that were committed by everyone involved, and ensure that those individuals are held accountable to the fullest extent of the law.

William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for more than 30 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)