President Trump’s poll numbers nudged upward even as he faced impeachment for calling on Ukraine’s president to investigate his country’s ties with prominent Democrats and election interference.

The same arbiters of smart who fell for the Russian collusion hoax could not explain how this was possible. They resorted, as always, to condescension.

“Trump supporters are in a cult,” remains the prevailing narrative.

Too stupid to understand the onion layers being methodically peeled back by the “brilliant” Adam Schiff, the huddled masses dismissed the entire enterprise as a witch hunt, because the President told them so on Twitter.

Except maybe the opposite is true.

Perhaps Trump’s poll numbers increased because people who need to make causal connections to survive see what our best and brightest in Washington do not: this Russian stuff has always been bunk.

Last month, the New York Times reported that U.S. Attorney John Durham is looking into whether the Steele dossier was used in the crucial Intelligence Community Assessment (ICA) that concluded Russia interfered in the 2016 election.

Durham is apparently asking: If the Steele dossier tapped Russian sources to reveal a Putin plot to harm Hillary, why did it primarily include crazy stuff that hurt Trump? And if it was created to smear Trump, why did the intelligence community rely on it to conclude that Putin was out to get Hillary?

Three years of investigations have determined the dossier was phony. Although ostensibly sourced in Russia, it purports to repeat the hearsay of informants who could have been anywhere.

That includes Ukraine, which at the time was working with Fusion GPS (the same firm researching the dossier) on a false-flag political operation to falsely connect the Trump campaign to Russia.

It includes Great Britain, where former MI6 agent Christopher Steele – who supposedly authored the document – lived and worked.

The dots are not that difficult to connect.

On July 13, 2016, British academic Dr. Andrew Foxall penned an op-ed in the New York Times, “Why Putin Loves Brexit.”

The British aristocracy has a condescending view of the hoi polloi who voted for Brexit, regarding them as easily manipulated, Pygmalion-like, by smarter people.

They assumed Putin was playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who voted to reject the European Union, because that’s how they see the world.

Among the Cambridge class, this simple prejudice makes Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting evidence.

Foxall blamed Russia for the previous month’s Brexit vote, adding in a little-noted aside:

The United States is so concerned over Moscow’s determination to exploit European disunity that in January, James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, began a review of Russia’s clandestine funding of European parties.

Yes, the Obama administration was spying on conservative European political parties. This means, almost necessarily under the Five Eyes Agreement, that foreign agents were returning the favor and spying on the Trump campaign.

John Brennan was asked in his February 4, 2018 appearance on Meet the Press about the role of the Five Eyes Agreement in investigating the Trump campaign, and he made a blunt admission:

Now I’m not going to get into details about how it was acquired. But the F.B.I. has a very close relationship with its British counterparts. And so the F.B.I. had visibility into a number of things that were going on involving some individuals who may have had some affiliation with the Trump campaign. And so the intelligence that we collected was pulsed against that. And I thought it would have been derelict if the F.B.I. did not pull the threads, investigative threads, on American persons who might have been involved with Russia and working on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly.

There is no way to read his answer except to infer that he prodded the FBI investigation into Trump with the help of “British counterparts”, and he’s proud of it.

A working hypothesis: foreign actors fabricated Russian interference because they didn’t like Trump’s criticisms of NATO and its Ukraine policy.

Brennan lassoed James Comey into helping to sell the prejudices of their British betters as actual evidence, stupidly lending the CIA and FBI to this afternoon tea plot against an American political campaign.

Eventually, Brennan blessed the lie with an official-looking ICA report.

The political class bought into the whole charade because being involved in tectonic events is why they chose politics in the first place.

It struck at their delusions of grandeur when working-class voters defied their polls, focus groups, and think tanks and chose someone with scant political background to be president.

The evil geniuses behind this operation baited the hook with a Putin lure knowing that the Republican establishment (see, e.g. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney, NeverTrump) would not be able to resist.

“Russia v. America the Rematch” would make America 1985 again, and Washington insiders threatened by Trump’s insurgency would reclaim their petty little thrones and dominions.

Dependably, the mainstream media also took the bait.

People in the places that count – voters in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Michigan – see the machinations to undo an election over phony foreign intrigue as the real outrage, and impeachment was only more of the same.

Now that impeachment has failed, it is time to get back to the biggest scandal in American political history.

That a great nation could be made to list upon such shallow waves is the story of our time. Here’s your chance, American journalism, to redeem yourself. Whoever first gets the details about the dubious Intelligence Community Assessment wins.