The only reason anyone is still talking about this subject, let alone investigating it pursuant to an order originating at the highest levels of the United States Justice Department, is that the media propaganda arm of the Democratic Party has refused to stop headlining it, despite a total lack of evidence of criminality after continuous investigation for over half a year by multiple agencies of the United States government.

Rod Rosenstein’s appointment of Robert Mueller to investigate wholly unsupported claims of “links and/or coordination between the Russian government and … the campaign of President Donald Trump” poses the most serious threat to American constitutional government and domestic peace since the Civil War.

Despite this massive evidentiary void, a democratically elected, thirty-state Electoral College victory president, of absolutely certain constitutional legitimacy under procedural norms now 230 years old, is to be substantially disabled in the performance of his office for an unknown length of time, while an army of lawyers and political enemies, enabled by Mr. Rosenstein’s order, swarms the capital looking for something, anything, to justify its frenzy.

For months, breathless headlines reporting unsourced leaks, insignificant interviews, and memory cavils will dominate the corporate media’s news shows, websites, and print outlets, while critical domestic and international concerns, and the President’s already substantial accomplishments, go unreported, and the agenda that brought him to the White House languishes.

Without so much as the identification of a crime, and -- still worse -- without a shred of evidence that the “coordination” referenced in the Rosenstein order occurred, or, if it did, that it might amount to a crime, a special counsel with effectively unlimited budget and power has been appointed.

This counsel’s roving army could wreak havoc on the ability of the constitutionally elected President to carry out the functions of his office.

How did this astounding development occur in the absence of any crime or evidence of the alleged collusion?

It’s quite simple:

During the last four months, the Democratic Party’s close allies in the corporate media (NYT, WP, CBS, CNN, ABC and NBC), though zombie-like repetition of their Party operatives’ unhinged Russian fantasy, and the overwhelmingly Democrat permanent Washington bureaucracy, through unsourced leaks, have created, a climate of fear, suspicion and chaos. They have then blamed the President for the poisonous atmosphere they themselves created, and, finally, and unsurprisingly, have frightened a Justice Department official into doing their bidding.

Those who elected President Trump have justifiably concluded from all this that what is now unfolding in Washington is an attempted coup d’état, and that America is now in a so far non-shooting civil war. As in 1860, the losing side refuses to accept the clear and unquestioned victor in our nation’s quadrennial presidential election, and is determined to be rid of him by hook or crook, the voters and the Constitution be damned

It is to be hoped that this time, unlike 1860, hostilities remain devoid of sustained violence. But it is not too soon to remind those who are promoting “resistance” to the constitutionally elected President that the vast majority of those who don’t wet their pants while in the same room with a loaded gun are on the side of constitutional governance and the legally elected President.

The President’s enemies in the corporate media and the permanent bureaucracy are so detached from reality, so unconcerned with adherence to the norms of electoral legitimacy that have produced almost uninterrupted domestic stability in the world’s leading democratic republic for over 200 years, that they risk open conflict and violence. That is how desperate they are to rid themselves of the man whom they apparently regard as a mortal threat to their agenda of permanent governance by the Left.

The corporate media’s ceaseless repetition of headlines beginning “allegations of Trump collusion with Russia,” each time utterly unsupported by hard evidence, repetitions which thereafter are parroted by local mainstream media outlets, has created the vague feeling among the inattentive that something is amiss. Even an Assistant Attorney General appointed by the President -- Washington bubble-trapped, apparently -- is not immune to the paranoia and fear generated by the drumbeat of empty, unsourced and unsupported assertions.

It’s all been an object lesson in Goebbels’ first principle of propaganda -- a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth -- and a further lesson in our propaganda masters’ variant on the Goebbels’ rule: A charge, repeated often enough, however devoid of factual or evidentiary support, will leave some stain.

For nine months the corporate media has kept alive John Podesta’s desperate “Russia collusion” illusion -- despite the gaping void where evidence for that illusion should be.

Given the federal bureaucracy’s hatred of President Trump, and the propaganda outlets’ willingness to print any negative rumor or unsourced allegation about the President, if there had been any real evidence for the Podesta fantasy, it long ago would have been made public.

Predictably, the new President’s diminished ability to function in the chaos created by the permanent federal bureaucracy and its MSM allies will be cited as evidence of his unfitness for office.

The corporate media and Washington’s cossetted bureaucrats have come to think of themselves as our masters. After eight years of Obama, they’ve developed an intensely felt sense of entitlement to govern. The enormity of the shock to their sense of entitlement caused by Trump’s election hasn’t even begun to wear off.

Their coping mechanism is to do all they can to sabotage and destroy President Trump, and to congratulate themselves for their malignant efforts.

A lawyer and respected former FBI head has now been loosed on the Presidency, to investigate the Democratic Party’s most ludicrous excuse for its 2016 presidential defeat, an excuse for which there is no evidence, and which, even if true, probably would not constitute a crime.

God only knows how long the circus will last, while it undermines the ability of a constitutionally legitimate President to govern.

Trump’s supporters expect -- demand -- a full-throated denunciation of what is occurring by congressional Republicans and senators. Those who defend the President from these transparent and groundless efforts to destroy his administration will be rewarded by voter support and loyalty. Many of the fainthearted will be looking for other work after 2018.

The nation is sailing into dangerous waters. No American vessel of state has ventured into these parts since 1860. And it is not the elected president who has brought us here, but those whose offended sense of entitlement to rule have lead them to believe they can first ignore, and then overrule, a decisive electoral outcome.

The best resolution to the Left’s present insurrection against American constitutional processes would be for Robert Mueller -- a patriot, highly decorated Vietnam veteran, and, up till now, a lawyer and public official of unquestioned integrity, to very expeditiously and thoroughly exhaust the reasonable avenues of investigation and then to promptly bring this dangerous, baseless charade to a halt.

Then the Democratic Party could honorably abandon its divisive and self-destructive “resistance” to America’s legitimately elected President, and assume its proper function in our free, representative democracy as … the opposition.

Jared Peterson is a graduate of the Harvard Law School, and has been a California attorney for over four decades.