Moscow couldn’t even divine the state of play in Ukraine, a next-door neighbor its agents had deeply infiltrated. Yes, Putin is a ruthless little man. The notion, however, that he and his ruling mafia family are ten-feet tall and blindingly efficient, expertly conducting the American electoral process like an orchestra from their Kremlin perch, is hilarious — or it would be, were it not the progressive political establishment’s pretext for not only continuing to insert the FBI into our politics, but actually increasing the bureau’s intrusions, its election-meddling, as we get further and further from the 2016 election that Russia did not actually affect. …

Wading through this endless saga, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. At this point, what matters most is not the wayward history of the 2016 election. What matters most is what imperils our democracy: the government’s reliance on that history to justify abuses of power in the here and now.

Since 2016, the FBI has become much more aggressive in policing the free press and political speech. To justify this aggression, it has relied on the allegation, made by blatantly partisan current and former national-security officials, that Russia endangered American democracy through diabolical cyber machinations aimed at defeating Hillary Clinton. In the 2020 election, the bureau collaborated with congressional Democrats to push the bogus narrative that the Post’s reporting — its allegations that members of Joe Biden’s family leveraged his political influence into millions of dollars in foreign money — was “Russian disinformation.” Not content with that, the FBI also encouraged social-media platforms to suppress the reporting. And on the eve of the election, 51 national-security pooh-bahs followed the bureau’s lead, peddling the fiction that the Hunter Biden laptop was a Kremlin plant.

This was profound, counter-constitutional interference in our elections by our government. Yet, we’re expected to tolerate it because of Clinton-campaign-generated spin about Russian hacking that didn’t affect the outcome of the 2016 election, that the government’s lawyers refuse to raise even when — as in Assange’s extradition proceedings — raising it would seem to be in the government’s interest, that federal prosecutors apparently can’t prove, and that may not have happened at all.