OPINION:
The Biden presidency has begun, but try as they might, historians may have a hard time turning the page on the Trump era. Long-suppressed details of the dirty political tricks that bedeviled Donald Trump’s Oval Office tenure are continuing to filter out, exposing how the Democratic Party badly wounded its Republican nemesis with the help of intelligence professionals. Disturbingly, Americans have every reason to fear a recurrence in the future.
As the final hours wound down last week on the Trump term, the FBI declassified and released an interview with former British spy Christopher Steele, a central figure in the Trump-Russia collusion saga. Together with a colleague, the author of the infamous dossier that led to a spy operation on the 2016 Trump campaign “described President Trump as their ’main opponent’ and indicated that they were fearful about how Trump’s presidency negatively impacted the historical U.S-U.K. special relationship.”
Further, Mr. Steele told interviewers that once then-FBI Director James Comey decided to reopen an investigation into the mishandled emails of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, it “felt like the gloves had come off.”
The dodgy dossier, then, was the product of a foreign intelligence professional who viewed Mr. Trump as a political threat to his nation and who felt compelled to launch a counteroffensive to defend his preferred candidate, Mrs. Clinton. The document was leaked to compliant media, which triggered the special counsel probe that uncovered no collusion with Russia. By amplifying anti-Trump hostility, though, the president’s enemies ultimately succeeded in denying him a second term.
Democrats spent years laughing off the idea that their party sabotaged the Trump presidency and blew Republican dreams to smithereens. If Hillary didn’t blush with shame, she should have when, seated prominently at his inauguration, Mr. Biden remind his audience, “There is truth and there are lies, lies told for power and for profit.”
It has only been recently that Americans have learned definitively the extent of the collaboration of intelligence and political officials in service to the Clinton campaign. Worse, additional declassified documents have revealed that when foreign powers attempted to influence Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, the FBI chose to alert rather than investigate her. Happiness is having friends in high places.
It is sad that records unflattering to the powers-that-be came to light only as time ran out on the Trump era. Other incriminating records to follow will likewise come too late to rectify the misdeeds. For the Americans who cringed during the four-year assault on their chosen president, Mr. Biden’s inaugural speech rang hollow when he demanded, “We must end this uncivil war that pits red against blue, rural versus urban, conservative versus liberal.”
Mr. Trump climbed down from his mountain of money to give a hand up to the little guy. With a power beyond democracy, Democrats buried him beneath an avalanche of dirt. The conspiracy was not his, but theirs.
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