Russiagate Was Treason; Will Trump Prove That No One Is Above the Law?

The esteemed Thomas Sowell, easily the most important economist of the last 50 years, turned 95 a couple of weeks ago. He has an extraordinary ability to take complex ideas about economics and culture and distill them down in prose that speaks to everyone from PhDs to those with a GED.

His ability and willingness to address issues from race to economics to history in compellingly readable books are unmatched. Indeed, his Cultures trilogy is one of the most robust weapons one might equip themselves with in any battle against the nonsensical wokeness that plagues America in the early 21st century.

As one would expect from a career spanning over six decades, Dr. Sowell has more than a few quotes that are perfect for our time. My favorite is easily:

“Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as racists.”

Another is:

“One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain.”

As accurate as those quotes are, the following is perhaps the most insightful I’ve ever read:

“One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.”

While that quote seems like a reasonable observation in a normal political framework where politicians tell lies about one another and make promises they never intend to keep, today it’s something more. Its cutting accuracy seems to have been demonstrated every week since Donald Trump 47 took office, from USAID to intransigent bureaucrats to rogue judges. But now, finally, maybe, someone is starting to heed Dr. Sowell’s words.

I’m talking, of course, about the Russiagate hoax that Barack Obama and his national security team foisted on the American people. CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper essentially manipulated the Intelligence Community Assessment [ICA] such that the impact of a Trump Russia collusion charge was devastating. And they had a bit of help from the beginning.

Essentially, they undermined the credibility of the incoming administration and saddled the country with two years of intrigue, corruption, and uncertainty in the form of an investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. What’s more, Paul Ryan, the then-Speaker of the House who basically would have been just as happy with a President Hillary Clinton, would use the distraction to undermine Trump’s No. 1 issue: the border wall. He delayed the fight until after the 2018 midterms, which of course ended up being a bloodbath for the GOP.

Needless to say, Trump’s No. 1 issue was DOA when Congress reconvened.

By the time Mueller reluctantly admitted that there was nothing to the Russiagate hoax — six months after the midterms — the damage had already been done. Some coups take the form of military takeovers, others involve assassinations; this one involved a conspiracy at the highest levels of the Obama administration.

Things are not supposed to work like that. We have elections so the people can decide how they would like the nation to be governed. While there are always many people who are unhappy with the outcome, most Americans accept it because they believe in the system established by our Constitution.

John Adams said of that Constitution: "[It] was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." That is demonstrably true. It’s a piece of paper. Americans accept the outcomes of elections not because there are stormtroopers stationed on every corner ensuring acquiescence, but rather because they believe that, while flawed, our constitutional elections are a relatively honest and fair way to decide our paths forward.

Which brings us back to Sowell’s quote: “One of the common failings among honorable people is a failure to appreciate how thoroughly dishonorable some other people can be, and how dangerous it is to trust them.” What the Obama cabal did to Donald Trump and the country was anything but moral. It was insidious, it was treacherous, and most of all, it was treasonous.

And now that the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has released documents and suggested they show that Barack Obama was behind it all, we’ll get an opportunity to see what the Trump administration is really made of. It’s one thing to tell the American people about the treason of a previous administration, but it’s something else altogether to do something about it. Will it be like the Jeffrey Epstein debacle, where Americans were told the hammer is coming, only to be later told there’s nothing there? Or will this be a ruthless, methodical, and intentional prosecution of the traitors who put the nation through so much?

I would suggest that at a moment in time when public trust in government is near all-time lows, if the Trump administration has any hope of being considered successful, it will take the latter course. For far too long, Americans have watched as elites like Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, and Barack Obama have not only gotten away with what many see as abject treason, but then they have the temerity to lecture us that “No one is above the law.”

Most Americans agree with that and believe criminals should pay for their deeds. The question is, does Donald Trump? Will he demonstrate to the American people that we are indeed a nation of laws and not men, or will he tell us once again that there’s no there there and that in modern America, the only people who face consequences for their actions are those who stand up to the swamp and the ruling elites?

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA

The Jeffrey Epstein Case Is Far Bigger Than Jeffrey Epstein

Last week President Trump took umbrage to a question about the Justice Department’s assertion that there are no Epstein tapes, there is no client list and there is nothing more to be released.  Yesterday he made some more inane comments on the subject.  The Twitterverse has been brutal towards AG Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and his #2 Dan Bongino.  Many people were saying they felt betrayed given the fact that before the election we were told that the files would be released and the criminals held to account.

The president has a point.  There is a lot going on in Washington. There are natural disasters with dozens dead across Texas.  There are continuing ICE protests across the country.  There are budgets that need to be attended to as well as rouge judges who need to be corralled and numerous conflicts outside our borders that need to be midwifed.  And all of that besides the basic blocking and tackling of running the government and trying to advance the administration’s rather ambitious agenda.  And taking the time to talk about some files from a guy who’s been dead for six years seems like it might distract from all of that.

But, you see, here’s the thing.  People want answers that seem logical, that provide rational explanations to obvious questions, that provide proof that the speculation is wrong.  This is particularly true when the people now saying there’s nothing there were the very people who promised answers, transparency and accountability would be coming when they won.  Well, they won, and we’re getting the same obfuscation.

The truth is, if this was just a matter of a senator cheating on his wife with a lobbyist for some industry he regulates, it wouldn’t really matter in the big picture. If this was some bureaucrat taking bribes to sign a service contract for some shipping company nobody would really care.  Sure, the first is an ethics question and the second is illegal, but beyond the participants themselves they aren’t very important in the grand scheme of things. 

The problem here is that this is all happening in an environment where Americans are coming to believe that no one is ever accountable for their actions.  We see city centers across the country imploding as stores and shops and hotels close because of the crime where hoodlums and thugs and drug addicts can basically take or destroy whatever they want with impunity. We see judges issue injunctions against the administration despite SCOTUS specifically ruling they can’t.  At the same time we have politicians, Antifa and activists undermining, and hindering and assaulting ICE agents who are trying to deport criminals, and the chances of them being held accountable for these crimes is almost nonexistent. Nobody seems accountable for anything.  It seems in 2025 in America it’s only the fools who actually obey the rules because everyone else seems to do whatever the hell they want. 

Now add to all of that the fact that we’ve just spent much of the last 15 years watching politicians and the politically connected do whatever the hell they wanted and never face a reckoning. Remember Lois Lerner targeting Tea Party groups? Prosecution?  Of course not.  How about Eric Holder being in Contempt of Congress?  Jail time? Nope.  Compare that to Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro.  How about Hillary wiping her computer or Hunter Biden breaking basically every law in the book and getting a pardon from his daddy. Or Lisa Page and Peter Strzok not only not getting charged, but getting millions of dollars from the Justice Department after conspiring to keep Donald Trump out of the White House? And the list goes on.  In modern America it seems as if no one is ever held accountable for their actions.

And so it is onto this backdrop the Trump administration tells us that 1) Jeffery Epstein killed himself, and 2) there was no client list and there are no videos. 

And when reporters ask about it the President gets indignant. 

The problem with that is the Epstein case no longer has much of anything to do with Jeffery Epstein, per se.  The guy’s dead and he’s not coming back. None of the crimes for which he was responsible can be undone. But Americans have heard rumors that rich and powerful men, from politicians to tech billionaires to justices to high priced lawyers and Hollywood stars were all clients of Epstein in his sex trade with minors, yet they remain free as birds. The one person who was clearly demonstrated to have a connection reportedly settled with his accuser for millions of dollars.

We were told Epstein had logs and tapes that chronicled all of it and used them to blackmail his powerful clients.  Indeed, in February AG Pam Bondi said she hoped to release a "lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information" on Epstein and said of the material "It's sitting on my desk right now to review." Then of course there’s the fact that Epstein’s “assistant” Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking of a minor as well as transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity. He himself was convicted of procuring underage prostitutes in 2008  Then the guy conveniently “committed suicide” in 2019 after being arrested on child trafficking charges, and the video of his cell was “accidentally erased” or the cameras “malfunctioned” or the video was inconclusive. His lawyers claimed that the particulars of his death were far more consistent with murder than suicide, and many Americans agreed.

And if all of that were not enough, Jeffery Epstein was once a money man for the CIA and Ghislaine Maxwell’s father was reported to be a Mossad agent and then killed by them. 

So here is where we are.  A high flying millionaire with connections to the CIA and possibly the Mossad and MI6, who owned an island in the Atlantic and who is reported to have used it as a honey trap for the rich and powerful ends up dead and suddenly the people who were telling us they were going to expose the entire thing when they were on the outside are now telling us that there’s nothing to tell now that they’re on the inside. 

The reality is the Jeffery Epstein case is far more important than Jeffery Epstein ever was. There is credible evidence that Epstein was an asset for one or more intelligence agencies who were very possibly blackmailing powerful men in government, finance and elsewhere and Americans feel like they have a right to know. There is a great deal of smoke around the Epstein case and Occam's razor suggests that it is likely to be exactly what it looks like: A honeypot operation set up by the CIA / Mossad / MI6 as a blackmail vehicle.

This case may not be as important as others on the President’s desk, but it’s a far bigger deal than I think he understands. He promised transparency and accountability.  We are getting neither and the more his administration obfuscates the less people are going to trust him on those bigger issues. Americans want to know we’re moving back towards no one being above the law.  This case exemplifies exactly that.  How the President chooses to handle it will tell us a lot. 

Follow me on X at @ImperfectUSA