George Papadopoulos

It’s been a month since the President pardoned a turkey, so why pardon a flock of them now? Presidential pardons and commutations may be lawful and traditional, and the conduct of government agencies in the Trump years has certainly confirmed that presidential fiat might be fairer than the Justice Department. But some of the names in Trump’s flurry of pre-Christmas pardons smack of the Washington insider-trading that Trump has decried — and suggest we might be better off with no pardons at all.There are exceptional cases, of course, but they are rare. The necessity of Andrew Johnson pardoning Confederate combatants after the Civil War is obvious.

Among other things, the case of Gen. Michael Flynn reminds us of the old adage that things are always worse than you think. Right from the beginning of the attempted coup some of us took to calling 'the Russian Collusion Delusion', it was clear that the hounding of President Trump and various aides and supporters was shaping up to be the greatest scandal in American political history. In September 2018, I wrote here that it had become 'abundantly clear that [both Flynn and George Papadopoulos] both were set up by the FBI as part of a deliberate attempt to delegitimize Trump’s presidency'. I didn’t know the half of it. Yes, we knew that Flynn had been bankrupted and pressured to plead guilty to a bogus charge of lying to the FBI.

It’s been over three years since the FBI first launched its investigation into an alleged conspiracy between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government, and yet we’re still learning just how badly our intelligence agencies bungled Crossfire Hurricane. The president and his allies have been arguing since the probe went public that it was all a ‘witch hunt’ designed to put a stop to or delegitimize his electoral victory. Subsequently released details about the investigation seemed to track with that theory: Inspector General Michael Horowitz, for example, chided the FBI in a December report for failing to fulfill its full obligations when seeking FISA warrants against former Trump campaign official Carter Page. Sens.

This article is in The Spectator’s inaugural US edition. Subscribe here to get yours. More official reports, reprimands and (probably) indictments are to come in the Great Get Trump imbroglio of 2016 to 2019. But it is not too early to begin an autopsy of the greatest political scandal in American history. The patient is dead, dead, dead, and the last doctors in the room are the pathologists. The lawyers crowding the corridor outside the operating theater are interested not in resuscitating the corpse but in distributing and gorging upon its assets.

The Mueller report should have been a knockout blow to anti-Trump forces who invested their hopes in the special counsel. With Robert Mueller’s finding that the Trump campaign did not conspire with Russia to steal the 2016 election and that there was no clear path to indicting the president for obstruction, the enterprise should have shuddered to a stop. Instead, those who were at first dumbfounded by the special counsel’s report have since found reasons to be buoyed by it – by its grudging tone, its sly assertions resembling proof, and its insistence that not being found guilty should not be confused with innocence.