Do Republicans have the will to stop their shallow whataboutism and “it’s time to move on” long enough to seize victory?

The Right has been handed a rare path to strategic victory in its eternal struggle against the forces that oppose it: the media, academia, Hollywood, and their friends in the overweening international bureaucracies that govern the world.

Facing a grassroots insurgency in 2016, Democrats counterattacked on wildly unfavorable ground. They attributed Donald Trump’s popularity among displaced working-class voters to Vladimir Putin’s sleight of hand. The Russians, the theory held, had instilled in unsophisticated people a false Trump consciousness.

The Russians, the theory held, had instilled in unsophisticated people a false Trump consciousness.

This was tactically stupid for two reasons. First, it cast voters with residual sympathies for the Democratic Party as idiots manipulated by a strongman half a world away.

If you were someone from Ohio whose livelihood had been undermined by ridiculous regulations and lopsided trade deals, who was forced to compete in the low wage labor market with off-the-book illegals doing it for less and not paying taxes, then attributing a sincere desire for political change to Russian shenanigans simply added insult to injury.

Second, the brightest lights of the Left broke the law in this ludicrous escapade. It is always tactically dumb to suffer legal jeopardy for no good reason.

Details of the scheme have gradually come to light, and this much is presently known.

In March 2016, John Podesta handed over his emails in a phishing scheme to a hostile third party by revealing his password.

The emails showed the Clinton campaign coordinating with the DNC to fix primaries against Bernie Sanders. These people needed an explanation, and fast.

The emails showed the Clinton campaign coordinating with the DNC to fix primaries against Bernie Sanders. These people needed an explanation, and fast. The DNC worked with the FBI to connect Trump and Putin to the hack. It paid millions of dollars – off the books – to a former British spy, Christopher Steele, and a private computer testing firm, CrowdStrike, to affirm the consequent that Russia did it.

There was coordination. The FBI used Steele to get a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on the Trump campaign. It never tested the DNC computers, leaving the most crucial task in the inquiry to Clinton’s paid expert, CrowdStrike.

The DNC, essentially, was running the Russia investigation via private contractors through James Comey’s FBI. There are text messages and other damning documentary records that admit this was a political operation.

Attorney General William Barr has noted that it is unusual, to say the least, for the FBI to conduct investigations based on opposition research which “on its face had a number of clear mistakes and a somewhat jejune analysis.”

This week, John Solomon at The Hill reported that the British government had written a letter to Trump’s transition team after Buzzfeed published the dossier, apologizing for its role and confessing that it had no confidence in Steele’s credibility.

It is beyond a stretch to say Steele was working with actual Russian sources. He had last been to Russia in 2009. He spent his professional life as an anti-Russian gadfly. Fatuous claims are made on his behalf that Putin hated him so much that he had ordered him poisoned.

And yet, he’s the person our FBI relied on to figure out if Putin had kompromat on Trump.

CrowdStrike’s story collapsed even faster than Steele’s. A reputable group of former intelligence officials, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), has been critical of CrowdStrike’s work based on its own forensic analysis.

Not enough is made of this, but at the same time it was being paid by the DNC to inspect its computers, CrowdStrike was caught in the act fabricating a completely different Russian hack to serve Ukrainian disinformation.

That’s kind of suspicious, huh?

This is the greatest scandal in the history of political scandals.

This is the greatest scandal in the history of political scandals. The Right’s punditry, though, is still thinking small and has resorted to “it’s time to move on” and reflexive whataboutism: “Okay, so Putin interfered, but he did it by feeding disinformation to Hillary’s campaign through Steele.”

Say what? How is it that everything in the Steele dossier is false except its assertion that it came from real Russians? If our best analysts go down that rabbit hole, doesn’t it allow CNN to say in a year that the Democrats may have been fooled by the dossier, but so were Republicans?

There may be forces in the Republican Party that want to hold tight to interference because it serves a necessary Russia-bad worldview, but they should be ignored.

There are too few good statistical studies coupled with erudite analysis to say how Trump won Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Michigan and Wisconsin when none of the experts though that was even possible.

Here’s a wild hypothesis: telling people in those states their Trump-dabbling was a product of hostile foreign brainwashing that they were defenseless against because they didn’t go to Harvard probably had something to do with it, too.

Imagine for a moment what the Democrats would do if handed an identical set of facts.

It is politically stupid for Republicans to now agree with any baseless Russia interfered premise. It snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. Both Russian interference and collusion were a set-up and a lie.

Large swaths of the Washington establishment are personally implicated in misusing intelligence services to try to win an election.

Imagine for a moment what the Democrats would do if handed an identical set of facts.

Complete strategic victory is available to the Right. Do Republicans have the will to stop their shallow whataboutism and “it’s time to move on” long enough to seize it?

There are positive signs emanating from the Justice Department, but victory will require more than Bill Barr’s honesty, decency and intellectual curiosity. We shall see.

Thomas Farnan is a full time practicing lawyer from the heart of Trump-country. He has been featured in American Greatness, Townhall, the Observer, and PJ Media. You can follow him on Twitter.