Autopsy of a dead coup, Victor D. Hanson.

This is truly a fantastic essay. Most impressive. My favorite personal professor blows my mind again.

We all know the skeletal basics and a good deal of the miserable detail and nobody brings it together so well as Victor Hanson, but before beginning let's say as we read that we look for who will be tried and found guilty and shot by firing squad as required of a sensible nation.

And short of that, who will be imprisoned for life.

Short of that, who's name will live on in infamy.

Face it; nobody will. They'll write books excusing themselves, stray from known facts, mislead at least half the population and keep them malevolently mal-informed for the rest of their lives and onto following generations such as people still sympathetic for John Booth. Rolling Stones will write a song and perform it, "Sympathy for McCabe, Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Ohr, Strzok and Page."

Hanson's essay is divided into sections:

Preparing the battlefield
Weaponizing the deep state
The Mueller Investigation
The palace coup

Hanson posits that a coup is not possible without the perception of popular anger at a president, and the deep state is naturally cowardly.

He asks and answers why a coup d'etat has only two doors. Because if it had four doors it'd be a sedan d'etat.

Psych! Hanson doesn't say that.


Prepping the battlefield was a coordinated effort by media, political progressives and celebrities to demonize Trump.

Journalists consulted with the Clinton campaign to coordinate attacks.

Via Wikileaks, John Harwood Mark Leibovich, Dana Milbank and Glenn Thrush communicated with John Podesta's staff with Clinton campaign reviewing and even auditing in advance.

Glen Simpsion and Susan Schmidt spread lurid stories from the dossier.

Christiane Amanpour and James Ruthenberg said partisan coverage was justified for Trump given his assumed threat to The Truth.

* CNN tipped off Donna Brazile to debate questions
* CNN consulted with DNC about talking points for a Trump interview.
* 24-hour news cycles of "bombshell," "watershed," "turning-point," and "walls coming in" fake news.
* fabrications (removal of MLK bust from Oval Office)
* mythologies (Steele dossier)
* lies (Trump Tower meeting)
* assurances (Cohen will testify to Trump's suborning perjury)

CNN no longer a news agency, instead traffickers in false rumors and unproven gossip detrimental to Trump.
*individuals:
    Gloria borger
    Chris Cuomo
    Eric Lichtblau
    Manu Raju
    Brian Rous
    Jae Trapper
    Jeff Zeleny
* teams:
    Jim Sciutto, Carl Bernstein, Marshall Cohen
    Thomas Frank, Eric Lichtblau, Lex Harris
* guest hosts stooped to obscenity:
    Reza Aslan
    Anthony Bourdain
    Anderson Cooper

Celebrities exhausted public expressions of assassinating or injuring the president, to slice apart, shoot, beat up, cage, behead, and blow up the president.
    Jim Carrey
    Johnny Depp
    Robert de Niro
    Peter Fonda
    Kathy Griffin
    Madonna
    Snoop Dogg

[Hanson left out Julius Caesar as Trump beheaded by New York Public Theater Company]

Left wing social media and mainstream journalism spread sensational lies about supposed maniacal Trump supporters in MAGA hats. Without apologies as they evaporate.

Liberal attorneys, foundations, Democrat politicians and progressive activists sued to overturn the election on false charges of rigged voting machines, and subvert the Electoral College, introducing articles of impeachment. Sued, to remove trump under Emoluments Clause, invoked the 25th Amendment, resurrected the Logan Act, appointed a special counsel to discredit Trump presidency.

The deep state was weaponized by Obama's Department of Justice
*warped the Clinton email scandal investigation
* Bill Clinton's tarmac meeting with Loretta Lynch
* unethical immunity for Clinton aides, Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills
* James Comey's predetermined treatment of "likely winner" Clinton
* DOJ's Bruce Ohr's conflict of interests with Fusion GPS

Ah! Here we are. Here is the punishment so sorely needed.

A dozen FBI and DOJ grandees have resigned, retired, been fired, or reassigned for unethical and illegal behavior -- and yet have not faced criminal indictments.

The reputation of FBI is shot.
Administrators have:
* libeled Trump voters
* expressed hatred for Trump
* devised "insurance policies" in ending Trump candidacy
* inserted informants into the Trump campaign.

With security clearances intact they've hit the television airways as paid "consultants" and daily accused Trump of Russian collusion and treason without cross-examination or noice that both previously had lied under oath to Congress.

Brennan spread the Fusion GPS dossier among elected and administrative state officials. NSC requested the unmasking of surveilled names of Trump subordinates and leaked them to the press illegally.

The FISA courts are discredited for being hoodwinked by FBI and DOJ officials submitting an unverified dossier as evidence to obtain surveillance on American citizens without disclosure the dossier is a bought campaign hit-piece paid fro by Hillary Clinton, authored by a discredited has-been British agent, relied on questionable purchased Russian sources, and used in circular fashion to seed news accounts of imagined Trump misbehavior.

Mueller and Andrew Weissman have a long record of investigatory and prosecutorial overreach that has resulted in government liability and court mandated federal restitution.

Two subordinate FBI investigators were caught conducting an affair over FBI cellphones, during an election cycle they slurred the object of their subsequent investigation, ridiculed Trump voters, and bragged that Trump would never be elected.

The team quickly discovered there was no Trump-Russia collusion yet went ahead to leverage Trump campaign subordinates on process crimes going back 50 years in Trump business, legal and tax records.

The “counterintelligence” investigation subverted two years of the Trump presidency by constant leaks that Trump soon would be indicted, jailed, disgraced, or impeached. As a result, Trump’s stellar economic and foreign policy record would never earn fifty percent of public support.

[That's okay. The counterintelligence itself, plus the reputations of the Obama DOJ and FBI and ALL American media are damaged irreparably to 100%. They are all now very bad jokes of themselves.]
h
Mueller's preemptive attacks gave an effective offensive defense for th felonious behavior of John Brennan, James Clapper, ames Comey, Andrew McCabe, Bruce Ohr, Peter Strzok and many others while destroying the lives of bit players like Jerome Corsi, George Papadooulos, Roger Stone and provided exemption to the Washington hierarchy who lied under oath and obstructed justice and illegally leaked, unmasked and leaked names of surveilled Americans and misled federal courts.

Come was fired. McCabe took over. McCabe's wife received huge Clinton-related campaign PAC donations shortly before McCabe took over investigating Clinton email scandal. McCabe was cited by Inspector General for lying to federal investigators on numerous occasions. He lied to his own NY FBI subordinates to invest scarce resources to hunt for their own nonexistent leaks to disguise his own real leaking.

McCabe assembled FBI and DOJ cadre to open a counterintelligence investigation of Trump on the fumes of evaporating Clinton opposition dossier and perceived anger among the FBI that their director had just been fired. He informally counted how many Trump's own cabinet members could be convinced to help remove the president on grounds of physical and mental incapacity. This is the coup attempt against Trump, the first in U.S. history.

The conspirators thinking initially had been predicated on three assumptions.

1) Hillary Clinton was certain to win the 2016 election.
2) Trump was so controversial, and the dossier so vile that seeded rumors of Trump's perversity gave them exemptions to do whatever they pleased.
3) Trump's low polls, his controversial reset of American policy, general contempt held by bipartisan coastal elite, celebrities, and deep state, meant even illegal means to destroy Trump and abort his presidency were moral and heroic acts without consequence, and media will support them.

[My laptops are giving me headaches, over-sensitive trackpad on this one, keyboard skipping around, even between pages. It's flying all over the place, and I have to catch them as they occur. Please excuse the typos you notice. The whole thing was horrid.]