Ball Of Collusion: It's About Hubris

Commenter Unknown could have done much worse than to present the Andy McCarthy "theory of the case," the big picture narrative, this morning. According to this version of events, the Ball of Collusion tied both the Hillary pay to play scheme--a witches' brew of connections between the Clinton Foundation and Hillary's gig as Secretary of State, facilitated and concealed by a private communications network--to the War on Trump. The Mueller Inquisition was the attempt to cover up when the Russia Hoax failed to prevent Trump from becoming President.

There's a lot to recommend this theory. I won't argue against it in detail, although I'm skeptical, except to note that the Patrick Byrne story works against it. It seems to me that the use of Byrne to target Rubio and Cruz as well as Trump would always have been a long shot in terms of "Russian collusion," although perhaps useful for gathering political intelligence. It certainly played no discernable role in the Russia Hoax before Trump's election. I still incline toward the view that Trump himself was an existential threat to the Washington Establishment in ways that Rubio and Cruz were not, and that the over-the-top lawlessness of the Russia Hoax was therefore more than just an attempt to protect and continue the Clinton pay-to-play scheme. Any GOP administration would have been a potential threat to Hillary's operation, but Trump was something way out of the ordinary and so all the stops were pulled out to destroy him. Whatever. You can call my view "weak linkage" and McCarthy's "strong linkage."

For your reading pleasure this morning I've excerpted some of John Kass' review of "Ball of Collusion", in which that theory is presented: Andrew McCarthy’s book ‘Ball of Collusion’ thoughtfully connects the dots on Clinton and Obama. Even if you don't fully agree, it's worth the read:

Thoughtful people know that for all our grand monuments carved of granite and marble, a republic is an extremely fragile thing. Especially now, as a cynical establishment seeks restoration, as establishment Kemalist bureaucrats run for cover, and as the divisions in our nation widen and public discourse sounds like rival packs of angry barking dogs. 

And in a few weeks, sooner perhaps, the dogs will begin barking even louder upon release of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on his investigation of possible Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act abuses by the Justice Department and the FBI as they looked into Donald Trump and Russia.

It all starts with hubris. 

...

And what America is about, in part, he said, is this: 

“A self-determining people that has a government that is supposed to serve the people,” he said. 

“The turnaround here is that high officials think they are a government that happens to have people associated with it, but they are the ones who know what’s best for the country.” 

... 

The real collusion was that the Obama administration put the awesome powers of the federal government — law enforcement and intelligence — at the service of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. 

The scheme to get Clinton elected had two parts, McCarthy argues. The first was to shield former Secretary of State Clinton from disqualifying and potentially criminal allegations that she violated federal law by having a private unsecured email server and later destroyed the evidence. 

And, as an insurance policy, the other part of the scheme was to portray Trump as an agent of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. 

... 

“They (FBI, DOJ, CIA bosses) did not believe that Donald Trump was fit to be president,” McCarthy told me. “Now there are a lot of things you can say about Donald Trump, good and bad. But ultimately, the way this system works, is that we have elections. We don’t have the FBI and CIA as a check on the public.
“What happened here is that they decided their judgment about who was fit to be president was superior to the public’s, and they weren’t going to take the public’s determination for an answer,” McCarthy said. 

Note well what McCarthy implies here (above). The intel bosses had a much bigger problem with Trump than with any other potential GOP candidate. The full out war on Hillary's behalf might therefore never have been launched but for Trump's candidacy. In effect, therefore, what McCarthy says here argues against "strong linkage."

And when Trump won, and they were going to be found out, they panicked.

Again, I disagree. What we've seen--and McCarthy describes the famous WH meeting of the coup plot leaders in detail--doesn't look so much like panic as a coolly determined decision that this election of 2016 simply wouldn't stand. The Deep State was going to war, and they had every reason to believe that between themselves, the Dems, and the GOPe Never Trumpers, they would win. Probably quickly.

The framers truly understood human nature, the temptations that come with holding awesome federal power, and the problems with factions and blind partisanship. 

They understood what would happen if a people lost faith in their institutions, if those institutions were shaped, in grotesque partisan fashion, to serve only the elite, now often called the best and the brightest.

For all my championing of Patrick Deneen, I do tend to agree with McCarthy here regarding the framers of the Constitution. I think that, by and large, they had a fairly realistic understanding of human nature. They were faced with the daunting task of setting up a government from scratch in an environment that wasn't conducive to the older forms and they did their best to fulfill that task fairly shrewdly.