Conrad Black with good piece: https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/03/donald-trump-andrew-mccabe-impeachment-effort-backfires/
"Don’t try to impeach your opponent without legal cause.
No one following the Russian-collusion and related dramas should be in any doubt about the steady flow of the balance of damaging evidence away from Trump and on to his accusers. It is clear that the hierarchy of the FBI and analogues in the Justice Department and intelligence services, horrified at the thought of a Trump victory though confident it would not occur, took liberties — in the soft treatment of Hillary Clinton’s email and uranium problems, and in abetting the Clinton campaign’s effort to smear Trump with the Russian-collusion argument.
As the parallel investigations and diluvian leaking have unfolded, the anti-Trump Resistance has received a series of gradually suppurating mortal wounds. The Steele dossier was commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign; over a hundred FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers expected Hillary Clinton to be charged criminally, and President Trump was correct in saying conversations by his campaign officials had been tapped, a claim that was much ridiculed at the time. Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe testified that the Steele dossier was essential to obtaining a FISA warrant on a junior Trump aide (Carter Page), and McCabe and former director James Comey’s rabidly partisan helper Peter Strzok, and his FBI girlfriend Lisa Page, texted suggestions for influencing the FISA judge in the case. The judge recused himself, voluntarily or otherwise, after granting the warrant. Mueller set up his “dream team” of entirely partisan Democrats; McCabe failed to identify to the Bureau his wife as a member and beneficiary of the Clinton entourage and political candidate in Virginia; and the fourth person in the Justice Department, Bruce Ohr, met with Steele, and Mrs. Ohr helped compose the Steele dossier.....
The immolation of McCabe has resulted in a moving of the focus to Mueller by both pro- and anti-Trump forces, for different reasons. The Democrats and their media allies desperately want Trump to fire Mueller, to keep the impeachment canard alive. The president will not oblige them, though he has made the point that there was no excuse for this inquiry, as there was no prior crime nor any evidence of collusion, and that it was weakly and reflexively created by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein after Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a mistaken answer on a small Russia-related question at his confirmation hearings and recused himself on anything to do with Russia. Mueller is there only because Comey, after he was fired, illegally leaked a contested memo of a conversation with the president, as he acknowledged without embarrassment at a congressional hearing, to force the appointment of a special counsel on Russian matters (this despite his and McCabe’s assertions that there had never been government interference in the Russian investigation). Although Comey disparaged the Steele dossier, he and McCabe were complicit in allowing that dossier to be used as the basis for an illegally obtained and renewed FISA warrant against Carter Page, and for precipitating the Mueller inquiry. It is a reasonable supposition that what is terrifying the Resistance now is that the real scandal (as a number of us have been laboriously reciting at intervals for more than a year) is the corruption of the FBI and the Justice Department....
"Don’t try to impeach your opponent without legal cause.
No one following the Russian-collusion and related dramas should be in any doubt about the steady flow of the balance of damaging evidence away from Trump and on to his accusers. It is clear that the hierarchy of the FBI and analogues in the Justice Department and intelligence services, horrified at the thought of a Trump victory though confident it would not occur, took liberties — in the soft treatment of Hillary Clinton’s email and uranium problems, and in abetting the Clinton campaign’s effort to smear Trump with the Russian-collusion argument.
As the parallel investigations and diluvian leaking have unfolded, the anti-Trump Resistance has received a series of gradually suppurating mortal wounds. The Steele dossier was commissioned and paid for by the Clinton campaign; over a hundred FBI agents and Justice Department lawyers expected Hillary Clinton to be charged criminally, and President Trump was correct in saying conversations by his campaign officials had been tapped, a claim that was much ridiculed at the time. Deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe testified that the Steele dossier was essential to obtaining a FISA warrant on a junior Trump aide (Carter Page), and McCabe and former director James Comey’s rabidly partisan helper Peter Strzok, and his FBI girlfriend Lisa Page, texted suggestions for influencing the FISA judge in the case. The judge recused himself, voluntarily or otherwise, after granting the warrant. Mueller set up his “dream team” of entirely partisan Democrats; McCabe failed to identify to the Bureau his wife as a member and beneficiary of the Clinton entourage and political candidate in Virginia; and the fourth person in the Justice Department, Bruce Ohr, met with Steele, and Mrs. Ohr helped compose the Steele dossier.....
The immolation of McCabe has resulted in a moving of the focus to Mueller by both pro- and anti-Trump forces, for different reasons. The Democrats and their media allies desperately want Trump to fire Mueller, to keep the impeachment canard alive. The president will not oblige them, though he has made the point that there was no excuse for this inquiry, as there was no prior crime nor any evidence of collusion, and that it was weakly and reflexively created by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein after Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a mistaken answer on a small Russia-related question at his confirmation hearings and recused himself on anything to do with Russia. Mueller is there only because Comey, after he was fired, illegally leaked a contested memo of a conversation with the president, as he acknowledged without embarrassment at a congressional hearing, to force the appointment of a special counsel on Russian matters (this despite his and McCabe’s assertions that there had never been government interference in the Russian investigation). Although Comey disparaged the Steele dossier, he and McCabe were complicit in allowing that dossier to be used as the basis for an illegally obtained and renewed FISA warrant against Carter Page, and for precipitating the Mueller inquiry. It is a reasonable supposition that what is terrifying the Resistance now is that the real scandal (as a number of us have been laboriously reciting at intervals for more than a year) is the corruption of the FBI and the Justice Department....
