The only picture of collusion emerging from the Russian probes is one that implicates Hillary’s. Across the U.S. government, political appointees and deep state hacks were helping Hillary and gunning for Trump. One of her partisans over at the FBI, Peter Strzok, performed a virtual hat trick of political espionage: he went from inoculating Hillary against criminal prosecution (by convincing Comey to soften his description of her mishandling of classified information) to joining the quest to nail Trump, all while writing to his mistress, also at the FBI, that they had a mutual duty to prevent Trump from winning the White House. The cooings of the two turned into plotting. “Maybe you are meant to stay where you are because you are meant to protect the country from that menance,” she wrote to him, to which he replied: “Of course I’ll try and approach it that way.”

As an appropriately exasperated Jim Jordan, among others, reviewed all of this damning material at a Congressional hearing Wednesday, witness Rod Rosenstein, the Deputy Attorney General, looked blank, like he was listening to names read from the phone book. Could Rosenstein be any more of a D.C. mandarin? None of the blatant evidence of bias and political dirty tricks seemed to interest him at all. And, of course, the media is playing dumb about it all, recycling the usual lie that high professionalism and liberal bias can coexist in the government, a self-serving defense reporters often use to absolve themselves when caught out in donations to the Democratic Party.

In one of Strzok’s texts to his mistress, he alludes to an “insurance policy” the FBI must take out to prevent Trump from occupying the White House. The media calls this a “mystery,” and not one it finds terribly intriguing. What, they half-heartedly ask, could he possibly be referring to? To anybody even remotely paying attention to the criminal leaks both before and after Trump’s victory, it is obvious what he meant. The insurance policy unfolded in multiple ways: the FBI planting stories in the press about a criminal probe into bogus Trump-Russia ties, CIA director John Brennan using the front page of the New York Times to float half-baked foreign intelligence on the Trump campaign, Susan Rice spying on Trumpworld, Sally Yates and company trying to entrap Trump officials, and Obama holdovers frantically collecting material for what they hoped would be an impeachment case against Trump.

Obama Pentagon official Evelyn Farkas had blurted out that portion of the insurance policy earlier this year:

I was urging my former colleagues and, frankly speaking, the people on the Hill, it was actually aimed at telling the Hill people, get as much information as you can, get as much intelligence as you can, before President Obama leaves the administration.… Because I had a fear that somehow that information would disappear with the senior [Obama] people who left, so it would be hidden away in the bureaucracy… that the Trump folks — if they found out how we knew what we knew about their… the Trump staff dealing with the Russians — that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we no longer have access to that intelligence.… And that is why you have the leaking.

The press, as a beneficiary of all these criminal leaks, is intimately familiar with the insurance policy and continues to draw upon it as reporters seek to shift the scandal from political espionage against Trump to Trump’s exposure of it. For months stories have appeared questioning Trump’s sanity simply because he noticed that espionage. And the layers of it are even deeper than he realized.

Everything and more that Hillary accused Trump of was on display in the collusion effort on her behalf: she hired foreigners to dig up dirt to influence the election, had FBI and Justice Department officials (one official’s wife worked for the dirt-digger’s firm) working to defeat Trump, had reporters in her pocket disseminating the dirt far and wide, had multiple CIA directors and “intelligence” officials endorsing her while inflicting damage on Trump through leaks, and had an attorney general who helped spare her from an indictment. Yet with all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, Hillary couldn’t be put together again. And so the bitter-enders turned to de-legitimizing Trump until they could try to impeach him.

So far we have seen only a fraction of Strzok’s texts. But it is already clear from the few available that the massive abuse of power against Trump rested on an enormous sense of entitlement — that Trump was a singular “menace” to be stopped by an entrenched ruling class. From this elite drunk on its own rectitude came the foulest free-for-all atmosphere imaginable, in which those who cried “collusion” the loudest engaged it in the most.