Don’t let the Democrats off the hook.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical left and Islamic terrorism.

Michael Cohen, President Trump’s lawyer, was forced to drop his lawsuit against Fusion GPS over the smears peddled in its Clinton-Steele dossier because of the recent raids by the FBI.

Aside from Trump, Cohen was one of the few people with the standing to sue Fusion GPS and discovery might have pulled back even more of the curtain on the process by which Clinton opposition research was used to justify eavesdropping on Trump officials while manufacturing the Russia conspiracy theory.

Going after Cohen not only seizes control of materials normally protected by attorney-client confidentiality (at least until Hillary Clinton’s disgraced pick for Attorney General decided they shouldn’t be), but also protects Fusion GPS and suppresses a further line of inquiry into FBI misconduct.

The government investigations of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have also doubled as cover-ups.

Taking down Flynn protected a vital weak point at the National Security Council. McMaster sabotaged any investigation of unmasking abuses by Susan Rice, Samantha Power and other Obama associates. Those NSC figures who insisted on looking into them were summarily forced out.

The real climax of the Hillary investigation came when immunity agreements were handed out to her associates like candy in exchange for their “cooperation”. When Hillary and her people lied to the FBI, it wasn’t a crime. Not only wasn’t it a crime, but the whole point of the exercise was immunizing her people from prosecution so that a Trump administration would have little leverage against them.

The investigations are also crimes. And they not only abuse government power to suppress political opponents, but also work to suppress any counter-investigation of the crime being committing.

While Trump and Cohen had their attorney-client privilege shattered, Cheryl Mills inappropriately claimed attorney-client privilege in her relationship with Hillary Clinton, even though she had been a government employee, and not only did the FBI respect the claim, but she got an immunity agreement.

What do these three cover-ups have in common?

All three abused law enforcement resources to protect Democrat political assets. The Cohen raid, Flynn’s prosecution and the Clinton immunity agreements protected, respectively, Fusion GPS, Susan Rice and Huma Abedin, as well as other related figures. But protecting them was also a matter of self-protection for the key FBI and DOJ people who had been doing their bidding. Clintonworld and Fusion GPS had injected the materials into the government on which the illegal investigation of Trump was based. And Rice, Power and others had then abused the materials that came out the other end.

The cover-ups protected the political links to the investigations so that they would appear to be impartial criminal and national security affairs. Every exposure of the political links to these investigations has undermined confidence in their integrity and respect for their outcome.

The two most explosive secrets of this game were the Steele dossier that was the basis for the conspiracy theory of the investigation, and the eavesdropping and unmasking of Trump officials.

After all the obstruction, the Steele dossier was exposed as Clinton campaign opposition research. Part of its pathway into the bowels of the system was charted. But much of the map is still missing. And shutting down further examination of Fusion GPS helps protect its accomplices in the government.

But Cohen’s lawsuit also threatened to discredit the founding document of the investigation. Going after him forcefully changes the subject. It allows Mueller and his media allies to spin more defenses of the dossier’s credibility. Its origins have been exposed, but Cohen’s court case would have revealed the laughable nonsense the conspiracy theory was based on. And the incompetence and corruption of everyone in the FBI who had treated it as a serious document would have made them look like clowns.

Comey, McCabe and the gang are the type who begin writing their autobiographies in elementary school. They’re eager to be interviewed about their martyrdom, but they hate being laughed at.

And an extensive dissection of the errors in the Clinton-Steele dossier would have been hilarious.

The revelation that the Trump investigation was based on the work of political operatives was damaging, but it’s just dynamite. The nuclear bomb is that political operatives made extensive use of the resulting eavesdropping. The Clinton-Steele dossier can be written off as a dirty trick. But the unmasking climax is Watergate a thousand times over. It’s the worst scandal in political history.

A Democrat work product going into the justice system is bad, but not fatal. The system uses whatever information it can get. But a national security work product going to Democrats is absolutely lethal.

It’s one thing when you call the cops on a Republican. It’s another thing when the cops call you.

Flynn was an early target because he was positioned at the vulnerable point of the interface between the investigation and the Democrats that would have exposed the criminal behavior of both sides.

And that’s still the secret that will be protected at any cost.

The Trump investigation was generated by the Democrats, its existence serves Democrat political purposes and its output has been consistently exploited by Democrats in both legal and illegal ways.

Is this really a Deep State or a Democrat State?

The investigations haven’t just eroded the line between the justice system and partisan interests, they’ve eradicated them. When it’s impossible to distinguish between opposition research and prosecution evidence, then political opposition becomes criminalized.

Elements in the justice system had been radicalized in the same way as the media. Bias starts out with a thumb on the scale and then escalates to extensive coordination with political interests. A little crookedness in an existing case shifts over to setting the entire agenda while ignoring the facts.

Radicalization in the media is bad. But radicalization in the government is the end of freedom.

Those same abuses in the media have destroyed it as a trusted institution, but haven’t violated any laws. But when elements in the justice system coordinate with partisan interests and allow them to generate cases, set the agenda, spy on their opponents, raid them and imprison them: it’s tyranny.

Since President Trump took office, influential Federal judges began treating legal cases the way that the media treats stories. Instead of leaning one way or another within the confines of the facts and the law, they disregarded both and did everything possible to undermine an elected official whom they hated.

When Federal judges did that with the travel ban, illegal alien amnesty or sanctuary cities, it was bad enough. But then they began doing it with criminal cases aimed at the President of the United States.

That’s no longer a power struggle between the branches of government. It’s a police state.

Before and after the last election, the Democrats conspired to rig their primaries, plotted to tamper with the general election, and then sought to reverse its outcome and tamper with the next election.

In the typical manner of the left, they justified their crimes by attributing them to their victims.

Extensive coordination between political operatives, elements in the justice system, law enforcement, the State Department and the media manufactured crimes and built investigations around them.

Some call this network, a “Deep State”. But that shifts responsibility from the Democrats to an amorphous conspiracy that encompasses everything. And that lets the Democrats off the hook.

The investigations of Trump aren’t tainted because everyone in the FBI is bad. They’re tainted because Democrats tried to use them to rig one election and are trying to use them to rig another one.