There’s no escape from Russiagate

In June, Tulsi Gabbard found herself in a difficult position. As a dovish Iraq war veteran who happens to be Donald Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, she’d spent weeks trying to stop America launching air strikes against Iran. She’d cited intelligence reports which contradicted Israeli suggestions that Tehran was just days away from having a nuclear bomb. Trump didn’t want to know. “I don’t care what she says,” he told reporters, before ordering the strikes on Iran. Gabbard had been humiliated. Surely she had to resign?

Nothing is sure in Trumpworld, however, and humiliation is half the fun. Rather than falling out with the Donald, Gabbard instead redoubled her efforts to please him. She set her agencies to work harder digging up evidence about the “Russia hoax” – arguably the political project closest to Trump’s heart.

She positioned herself at the forefront of a campaign to go after the creepy network of senior Democrats and deep-state operators who in 2016 engaged in what Gabbard calls a “treasonous conspiracy” to smear Trump as a Kremlin asset.

Gabbard has published a number of previously classified documents suggesting that President Barack Obama, the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic establishment did collude and conspire with the intelligence community as part of a “years-long coup” against a legitimately elected Republican president. This has delighted the Donald. “Where’s Tulsi?” he called out at a White House event. “She’s, like, hotter than everybody. She’s the hottest one in the room.”

Gabbard’s findings were then passed on to Pam Bondi, another Trump-appointed hottie who has found herself in a tricky spot. As Attorney General, Bondi had talked up the release of the US government’s files on the late child rapist Jeffrey Epstein. But then her Justice Department and the FBI suddenly felt compelled to release a statement insisting there was no “client list” of powerful blackmailed men and Epstein had abused girls purely for his own sick gratification.

Bondi’s volte-face aroused suspicion worldwide, partly because Donald Trump once had a sort of friendship with Epstein and partly because Team Trump – especially the new FBI director Kash Patel – had spent years suggesting that the real Epstein story was a giant cover-up to protect the pedophilic liberal elite.

Now, however, Bondi finds herself back on the legal offensive thanks to Tulsi’s efforts on Trump-Russia. This week she ordered a grand jury investigation into the conspiracy to tie Trump to the Kremlin. In other words, Trump’s long-promised “retribution” for the eight years of legal torment he suffered at the hands of the fiercely Democratic establishment in Washington, DC, has formally begun. “Half the lawyers in Washington just went under retainer,” said the legal scholar Jonathan Turley on Monday. “And it seems like the other half are retaining them.”

Trumpists are celebrating the exposure of what they refer to as “the greatest political crime in American history” – even if the depth of the conspiracy remains hard for most mere mortals to fathom. Trump’s opponents, meanwhile, suggest that the President, Bondi, Gabbard, Patel and others are engaged in a blatant attempt to distract from the Epstein saga. (In a curious twist this week, the Republican House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas to various Department of Justice figures as well as to Bill and Hillary Clinton as part of their Epstein investigation.)

It is amusing to watch Trump’s appointees bend over backwards in order to keep Daddy happy. But the revival of Russiagate is much more than a mere smokescreen. It has always been a key part of Trump’s plan for his second term. Indeed, Trump appointed Bondi precisely because he trusted her to be more aggressive than his previous attorney generals when it came to the Russia accusations.

Trump’s inner circle have long believed that revealing the truth about Operation Crossfire Hurricane – the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election – will in turn expose the whole secret history of the Democratic party’s eight-year lawfare campaign to destroy Trump. It’s all about the weaponization of justice and the Democratic party’s co-opting of intelligence agencies and the media in subsequent scandals. It’s about the Hunter Biden laptop story and the “stolen election” in 2020, as well as the contorted campaign to put Donald Trump behind bars during Joe Biden’s presidency.

Sources close to Trump suggest that he has softened toward his enemies since he barely dodged an assassin’s bullet last year. His supporters may be crying out for Obama and Hillary Clinton to be criminally prosecuted but Trump seems unlikely to pursue such a path, even if he enjoys posting memes of Barack and Hillary behind bars.

Yet the legal hounding of Trump did result in several of his associates and advisers serving time in prison. Naturally, then, Trump’s allies are now salivating at the possible indictment and conviction of figures such as John Brennan, the former head of the CIA under Obama, or James Comey, the former FBI director, or James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence.

“We’re going to be a banana republic unless we take care of business now,” says Steve Bannon, who also went to jail over a Trump-related charge last year. Bannon has called for “rough, Roman justice” and this week he urged Bondi’s department to “stick the landing” or risk further disgruntlement within the Make America Great Again movement.

The use of a gymnastics metaphor is apt, since Bondi will have to pull off some impressive legal acrobatics in order to prosecute leading anti-Trump figures without being exposed herself at some point for weaponizing the justice system. Whichever prosecutor she chooses must prove beyond reasonable doubt that Trump’s opponents knowingly attempted to commit treason or some other serious crimes. Her Republican backers, meanwhile, will have to keep saying that the Democrats derailed Trump’s first term with all their judicial wrangling at the same time as the Trump administration sets in motion a course of legal activities that seem certain to clog up his second term. There’s no escape from Russiagate.