During the past three years or so, the establishment has learned that Donald Trump barks but mostly does not bite. Nobody fears Trump. Bernie Sanders and his zealots are another story.
Codevilla's explanation for the state of affairs as he frames it is simple and sensible. Bernie and his followers know that they were screwed out of the 2016 nomination by the Dem establishment. They also know that the Intel Community was deeply complicit in the plot in favor of Hillary:
... in July 2016, the FBI’s decision to take the DNC’s story at face value, not to press for examining the server, and not to investigate other possibilities for the leak—never mind Rich’s murder—was to shield the Democratic Party’s establishment against a threat more clear and present than the then-unlikely prospect that Trump might defeat Hillary Clinton. Looming over the Democratic Party at that instant was that Bernie Sanders’ people were on the verge of disrupting the convention and jeopardizing her election.
The FBI’s collusion in the supposed hacking, its support of the narrative of the DNC-as-victim, rather than of the reality of the DNC’s fix of the primaries, helped cut the ground from under possible Sandersista protests. This would not be the last time that the agencies took sides in intra-ruling class quarrels.
The Dem establishment knows that if the Bernie faction gets control of the party, they will exact retribution. Bernie is therefore an existential threat:
