Democrat Russiagate hoaxers owe American taxpayers $32 million.

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

After 22 months and $32 million, a team of 19 prosecutors with twice as many staff members, wielding 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witnesses, and 500 search warrants, produced nothing multiplied by zero.

Nothing except over 400 pages of allegations, innuendo and slime with a great big hole in the center.

Mueller and his intrepid team of Democrats had set out to investigate a great conspiracy. After all those millions of dollars, the raids and indictments, there’s no collusion. The supposed counterintelligence investigation turned up nothing on President Trump except his hostility to the witch hunt against him.

If firing an FBI director is a crime, then Bill Clinton should have been impeached or imprisoned. But if a former FBI director can treat the firing of an FBI director by the president as a crime, then is the country really run by the presidents and the voters who elect them, or by the FBI directors?

Mueller and his Democrats painstakingly document Trump’s dislike of their efforts. And then they imply that there is something criminal about an innocent man trying to fight back against a witch hunt. If you don’t defend yourself, it’s perjury. If you do defend yourself, then it’s obstruction of justice.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

President Trump had the right to fire Comey. He had the right to find an AG who would give Mueller the boot. And the Mueller report, with its swill of unsubstantiated innuendo, is the best evidence of that.

The fact that Mueller and his people were allowed to finish the spiteful 400+ page contribution to the Democrat 2020 campaign and that it was then made public, is the best evidence of Trump’s intentions.

Mueller wasn’t fired. The report wasn’t buried. And it doesn’t indict Trump. It indicts the Russia hoaxers.

President Trump would be well within his rights to send the DNC a $32 million bill for it. American taxpayers should not be on the hook for funding Democrat opposition research. That’s what George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, and Tom Steyer are for. The Mueller investigation was the last refuge of efforts by Democrat operatives to target Trump using the government. After losing the White House, they resorted to a special prosecutor. And after Mueller, the investigation will be run out of the House.

But what, after all these years, all the millions of dollars, the hundreds of witnesses and search warrants, the countless lunches, subpoenas, and media leaks, is there left to investigate?

The Mueller report is a dog chasing its tail.

In a fitting end to an investigation whose momentum of indictments was built mostly on perjury traps, of indicting people for lying to the FBI, without there actually being a crime that they were lying about, the Mueller report’s best shot at President Trump depends on implying that he obstructed its investigation. But how can an investigation that never even comes close to a crime be obstructed?

The Mueller investigation was often described as a fishing expedition. After nearly 2 years fishing in the D.C. swamp with the world’s biggest fishing pole, the 59 fishermen and fisherwomen discovered that there were no fish. Certainly not the big fish that the partner at one of the most lefty law firms had hoped to land. The Mueller report is a 400+ page excuse for wasting the time, money and nerves of hundreds of millions of people in a nakedly partisan campaign to undermine a sitting president.

The Mueller report, like every previous incarnation dating back to the Obama era, dangerously conflates a counterintelligence investigation of Russia, with an investigation of the Republican opposition. It follows in the footsteps of the Clinton campaign’s Steele dossier, right down to a search for the ‘pee tape’ that never existed outside the perverted fantasies of Clintonworld and its creepy power couple.

It should never have existed. And the only item meriting an investigation is that very investigation.

The Obama administration spied on Trump allies under the pretext of counterintelligence. Mueller and his team of Obama and Clinton supporters went after Trump and his allies under the same pretext. After years of investigations, eavesdropping, raids, leaks, violations of lawyer-client confidentiality, the Mueller report has no choice but to concede that one of the most intensive investigations in the country has failed to make the case for the entire premise of the witch hunt that has been going on for years.

And that should be the real story.

Instead, the media declares that the Mueller report fails to exonerate President Trump. In America, you’re innocent until proven guilty. In the media, if you’re a Republican, you’re always guilty. And in Muellerworld, no one is truly innocent, they just haven’t been subjected to enough raids, wiretaps, misleading questions, indictments, threats and flashlights in their eyes, to confess to the right thing.

The Mueller report, like its predecessors, was never meant to find definitive evidence of guilt because it never existed. Collusion could never be proven, only sleazily implied. The purpose of the investigation was the investigation. The original collaboration between the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign to target Trump, turned into the Mueller investigation, and now that the report is in, will be reborn as a House Democrat campaign, championed by Rep. Nadler, to go after President Trump.

Each phase of the investigation never turned up a smoking gun, but its existence maintained the justification for actual or potential action against Trump and his political allies. And so the investigation isn’t over. It can’t end. Instead it gets passed along from campaign operatives to DOJ personnel, from former spooks to current spooks, from FBI directors to retired FBI directors, from disgraced prosecutors to disgraced congressmen, not for the purpose of fighting the Russians, but of fighting Americans.

The dangerous precedent of accusing political opponents of working for foreign governments extends far beyond Trump or this current phase of the investigation. It strikes at the very heart of America.

During the Bush years, a million lefty cars were proudly stamped with bumper stickers reading, “Dissent is the Highest Form of Patriotism”. The Mueller investigation is only the latest example of the criminalizing of political dissent with normal presidential campaign behavior such as opposition research, and backchannels to foreign governments, being targeted by intelligence agencies.

The only people who have paid a price for this travesty have been Trump allies and taxpayers.

And that ought to change.

The Mueller report is indeed an indictment, not of Trump, and not only of its investigation, but of the entire Russiagate smear. Democrat conspiracy theorists will not allow their lie to die. They will dig it up and keep it alive in any branch of government they control. And, as the Mueller investigation shows, even in some that they do not. The only way to end the smear is to investigate the investigation.

22 month, millions of dollars, 2,800 subpoenas, 500 witnesses, and 500 search warrants, amounting to nothing won’t end the lies, the smears, the investigations and the accusations.

The lie will not die until its authors, its perpetrators and its accomplices are investigated and exposed. And until then, Democrats, not taxpayers, should be forced to pay for the cost of their Russiagate hoax.