“Truth exists, only falsehood has to be invented.” This maxim from the cubist painter Georges Braque is itself a truism, but it is a profound one. It applies now to the findings of Robert Mueller. The special counsel’s two-year investigation of Russian tampering with the 2016 election found that, contrary to innumerable tendentious assertions from the Left, neither President Trump nor his associates colluded with the Kremlin in its dastardly interference with American democracy.
As the allegations were not fact, it follows that they were false, and substantially malignant, too, given the ferocious tenacity with which they were fostered and spread. It’s vitally important for the nation’s political hygiene that those who concocted the fable be exposed and punished as necessary. Their strategy and tactics need to be laid bare. Only thus can public faith in our electoral and political system begin to be restored.
The failures of a debauched news media are clear enough. Many of the highest-profile journalists peddled sensational stories based on flimsy sourcing and usually shuffled their feet silently and looked the other way when their fiction was debunked. (The Washington Examiner is among several honorable exceptions to this widespread disgrace, having followed the facts rather than the prompting of wish fulfillment.) But however powerful the press, and however appalling its recent performance, it is free, as is appropriate, to gain or lose credibility as it chooses.
Such is not the case, however, with federal intelligence and investigation agencies, whose senior officers appear to have dishonestly launched an investigatory attack on a Republican candidate and president they hated, based on a swiftly falsifiable opposition research document commissioned and paid for by his Democratic opponent. It should be remembered that the “dodgy dossier,” written by a former British spy who wouldn’t vouch for its veracity and based it on third-hand tittle-tattle, had been investigated by the FBI for 10 months before Mueller began his lugubrious work.
In that time, the vast federal intelligence apparatus had found no actual crime nor, it now seems, even a real indication of risk to national security. Yet FBI Director James Comey engineered the appointment of a special counsel, inflicting serious damage on his country. He was aided and abetted in this, as our editorial points out, by former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, and several others. How much of what they did was merely incompetent screw-up and how much was conspiracy, perhaps reaching high into the Obama administration, must be discovered.
The fight over what Michael Barone calls “Collusiongate” has contributed mightily to America’s divisions, which are the subject of our cover story “Modern Babel.” There are also excellent reads on runaway federal spending, on the collapsing Southern Poverty Law Center scam, and on the resilience of racial minority support for President Trump. Additionally, don’t miss our Connecticut Yankee at the rodeo in the Life & Arts section, and Sohrab Ahmari’s journey to Catholicism.
