As the Obama wall of silence begins to crumble, the FBI’s reputation is befouled by its own rash actions, a politicized Justice Department stands revealed as, well, politicized, and the Democrats furiously spin the facts outlined in the Nunes Memo and subsequent revelations, there’s only one overarching question left to ask: what made them think they could get away with it?

And by “them,” I mean the lot of them—the corrupt, partisan officials, the political operatives masquerading as selfless public servants, the intelligence community pooh-bahs who betrayed their trusts, the preening “straight arrows,” the talking heads, the Washington bureau chiefs, the White House correspondents, every man jack of whom did his level best to create, run, and disseminate a disinformation operation designed to do one thing: destroy the unwanted and unwelcome presidency of Donald J. Trump.

From the moment it dawned on Hillary Clinton, late on election night, that she had managed to blow a fixed fight, and that there would, therefore, be hell to pay, the Democrat-Deep State-Media Complex suddenly had to conceal their own malfeasance by doing what the Left does best—projecting its own sins onto others:

We now know that the Justice Department under Loretta Lynch and the FBI under James Comey pretzeled themselves in order to avoid indicting Hillary Clinton over her blatant violation of security protocols involving her private email server; that the Clinton campaign paid for the Steele “dossier,” and fed it information ; that the Obama administration, on its way out the door, liberalized the NSA surveillance distribution list to allow it to “unmask” American citizens under the pretext of national security; and concocted— literally on the spot —the idea of “Russian collusion” as an explanation for its candidate’s repellent ineptitude.

We also know that the bogus, media-amplified outcry over the non-existent “Putin” connection created the climate in which a too-decent Jeff Sessions recused himself and allowed Rod Rosenstein to appoint a special prosecutor with a mandate not to investigate a stated crime (for “collusion” is not in itself a crime) but to effectively probe all things Trump; that the fired Comey deliberately leaked his own self-serving memos to himself to a lawyer buddy and had them planted in the New York Times in order to facilitate the appointment of fellow FBI veteran Robert Mueller as Trump’s personal Grand Inquisitor.

We also know that the media, in the form of the Times and the Washington Post , and based on targeted leaks by the intelligence community, created the fall-guy characters of Carter Page and George Papadopoulos , the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this black comedy in which the dithering Comey stands in as Hamlet; that the Steele “dossier” was then cited by the FBI as grounds for its FISA warrants to surveil the Trump campaign, and that the surveillance was renewed on several occasions, despite being authorized under false pretenses.

Throw in the manifest conflicts of interest of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe – another former “straight arrow,” sans peur et sans reproche whose sudden defenestration at the end of January caught most of official Washington with its pants down; the tangled web of Fusion GPS, a gang of media types turned political operatives; the illicit office affair between two leftist radicals in the FBI determined to bring Trump down, et voila.

Why they did it is perfectly clear: Obama, himself complicit in the use of off-the-books emails, couldn’t afford to charge Clinton without getting himself into trouble. His administration pretended to “investigate” her, using Comey’s FBI as a front, all the while greasing the skids to let her slide. When it became apparent that Trump, whom they’d dismissed as a clown just a few months before, was a formidable, serious candidate they had to scramble to cover their tracks. And when he won, they had to pull out all the stops to ensure that his administration would be smeared even before Inauguration Day, hamstrung by innuendo and anonymous leaks via the media, intimidated by the misuse of the “unmasked” NSA data, and finally brought down by the sheer weight of the manufactured evidence.

In gangland, this is known as a frame-up. But then, the Democrats are little more than a criminal organization masquerading as a political party, who have long relied on the thuggish tactics of Tammany Hall and evinced a distinct fondness for fellow travelers.

In retrospect, the Russian “collusion” narrative should have been obvious from the start. The Democrats and their principal mouthpiece, the Times, had hitherto never met a Russian agent they didn’t like; they themselves were knee-deep in back-channeling “information” to Christopher Steele, and his primary sources were Russian mischief-makers feeding the gullible former MI6 agent a steaming load of codswallop he knew his paymasters would be only too happy to swallow.

Whether this scandal—or, to hear the Left tell it, nothing-burger—is “worse than Watergate” is of course in the eye and memory of the beholder. For the aging Baby Boomers, who have inherited the reins of the mainstream media just in time to see it all slip away, the foundational myths of their journalistic youths were the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, and they long to bring down a president one more time, just as they destroyed Richard Nixon less than two years after one of the greatest electoral landslides in history. Often with deep ties to the Clinton Administration, they were only too eager to sacrifice their ethics for one last shot at immortality.

As for the Deep State, it could ill afford to have such overt proof of existence be known, from the rigging of the Clinton investigation to the red-herring of “collusion,” and therefore the risk was worth the reward. As I wrote one year ago:

With the resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn in the face of a howling media mob, the knives are now out not only for other administration officials, but for President Trump himself. Make no mistake about what’s happening here: this is a rolling coup attempt, organized by elements of the intelligence community, particularly CIA and NSA, abetted by Obama-era holdovers in the understaffed Justice Department (Sally Yates, take a bow) and the lickspittles of the leftist media, all of whom have signed on with the “Resistance” in order to overturn the results of the November election. Welcome to the Deep State, the democracy-sapping embeds at the heart of our democracy who have not taken the expulsion of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party lightly. They realize that the Trump administration poses a mortal threat to their hegemony, and so have enlisted an army of Democrats, some Republicans, the “neverTrumpumpkin” conservative die-hards, leftist thugs, Black Lives Matter and anybody else they can blackmail, browbeat or enlist. They mean business.

As for the Obama Democrats—and has anyone seen the former president lately?—their unwillingness to accept the results of the 2016 presidential election, and their determination to overturn, is easily explained:

They never thought they could lose.

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