Even worse than Trump

Anti-Trump hysteria has so far proved to be a far greater menace than Trump himself.

First, though, before pursuing the point, let us make a preemptive attempt to pacify the antiTrump hysterics of the Democratic Party (and Republican Party, too).

Let us stipulate the following at the outset:

— Donald Trump is, yes, an egotistical blowhard.

— He is, yes, full of, um, hyperbolic bluster.

— He is, yes, prone to indulge in blather, with scant regard for its accuracy.

— And, yes, what’s more, he has always been something of a fast-talking con artist, a carnivalbarker of a hustler. There. Stipulated.

All of that, however, is irrelevant to a more urgent issue.

Trump’s litany of faults does not mean that legal propriety may, therefore, be waived in all matters related to him. Legal propriety cannot exist with an on/off toggle switch.

The law still has an obligation to be scrupulous regarding procedure and evidence, even when — especially when — an angry Washington establishment is going all-out to take Trump down.

Whatever Trump’s myriad character flaws, it is no longer seriously disputed that the media-ballyhooed Trump/Kremlin “collusion” saga was a nasty, vicious, whole-cloth fabrication of the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

Two special investigations bring all but the most closed-minded partisans to this conclusion — Robert Mueller’s probe and John Durham’s too, Durham’s ongoing.

The allegation that Trump was in traitorous cahoots with Vladimir Putin rested precariously on the wobbly assertion that a marginal Trump foreign policy advisor, a guy named Carter Page, was a suspected agent of the Kremlin. Page was, supposedly, the sinister connection tying Trump to Putin.

In a quest to validate this wholly baseless suspicion, a politics-compromised DOJ and FBI sought and obtained repeated secret warrants to monitor Page’s emails, phone conversations and other private activities.

But Page was in fact no Kremlin operative and never had been.

He was by background a top Naval Academy graduate, a man who had served four years active-duty in sensitive Navy intelligence with a high-level security clearance. He was a man with a spotless record and Boy Scout-clean reputation.

After military service, Page had been a business consultant specializing in Russian energy matters. He travelled frequently to Russia and spoke the country’s language, which he had studied at Annapolis.

But in the context of the “collusion” ruckus, here is the single, salient fact to know regarding Page: During his business travels to Russia, he served as a trusted contact source for the CIA.

In other words, the CIA consulted him regularly on his insights and picked his brain regarding developments in Russia. He remained in close contact with the agency for years.

This fact alone pretty much debunked the DOJ/ FBI claim — made under oath in court — that Carter Page was a suspected Russian agent and Trump’s link to Putin.

The government’s dubious claim of Page’s sinister relationship with the Kremlin is where a man named Kevin Clinesmith takes center stage in the drama.

An anti-Trump hysteric himself (as known from his strident social media posts), Clinesmith, a lawyer then in his late 30s, was an assistant general counsel with the FBI.

As such, he was put in charge of obtaining warrants from the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court allowing surveillance of the Trump campaign.

But a CIA email identifying Page as a long-time trusted agency source threatened to invalidate the government’s surveillance applications. So Clinesmith simply doctored the inconvenient CIA email.

He altered it to falsely assert that Page had never been a CIA source at all, much less a long trusted one.

Clinesmith’s DOJ/ FBI superiors then forwarded the faked email to the FISA court, apparently without bothering to check the altered CIA email against the original. The FISA court then proceeded to give the DOJ/ FBI surveillance requests the court’s rubber-stamp approvals.

Later, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz — an Obama appointee — discovered the CIA email discrepancy. The matter was turned over to special prosecutor John Durham.

A career federal lawman of legendary tenacity, Durham had famously exposed the gangster Whitey Bulger’s corrupt arrangements with the Boston FBI office. And in another headlined case, he had sent Connecticut’s grafting Gov. John G. Rowland, a Republican, to prison.

Sifting through the collusion controversy, Durham charged the FBI lawyer Clinesmith with making a false statement in an official court proceeding. The offense carried a possible five-year-prison term. Clinesmith entered a guilty plea.

Then things got really weird.

At Clinesmith’s sentencing, the Durham prosecutors urged prison time for the former FBI lawyer. Clinesmith was, after all, admitting that he had committed a serious felony, especially taking into account that the offense involved Clinesmith’s role as a government attorney — as an officer of the court.

What’s more, any way you looked at it Clinesmith’s offense was an attempt to defraud the judiciary and subvert justice. His offense centered on a highly sensitive FISA court proceeding involving, potentially, the impeachment of a president of the United States.

Yet despite all of this, the sentencing judge, James Boasberg, let Clinesmith walk out of the courtroom with one year’s probation.

Was this part of a Clinesmith agreement to cooperate in the investigation of the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC’s politicized Trump/Putin collusion scam?

Not that you could tell

from the sentencing proceedings.

Rejecting the prosecution’s request for a prison sentence, the judge declared that Clinesmith had already suffered enough from being caught up in the political maelstrom of the case.

As it happens, the judge himself was caught up in that same maelstrom. Acknowledging what was arguably a conflict of interest on his part, Boasberg noted that he himself had sat as chief judge of the secretive FISA court — the very court that had accepted Clinesmith’s doctored CIA email.

Standing before Judge Boasberg for sentencing, Clinesmith made an eyebrow-raising comment that nevertheless aroused little curiosity on the part of a news media more interested in discrediting Trump than following the facts wherever they pointed.

While confessing that he had altered the CIA email and acknowledging that he shouldn’t have done so, Clinesmith stated that at the time he doctored the email he fully believed his alteration was accurate and truthful.

The judge didn’t pursue this remarkable and puzzling statement. He didn’t question the possible implications of Clinesmith’s claim.

The judge didn’t ask, for example:

— What specifically caused Clinesmith to think that Carter Page had never been a trusted CIA source, despite the CIA’s own statement to the contrary?

— Did some bigwig further up in the Washington hierarchy — perhaps somebody of significant standing in the DOJ or FBI or maybe even in the Obama White House’s inner circle — give Clinesmith this notion?

— Was Clinesmith given some signal — a wink and a nod — that it would be okay for him to fudge the CIA email before sending it on, under oath, to the FISA court?

— Was he led to believe, by higher-ups, that doctoring the email was a case of the ends’ justifying the means? That it would be okay to engage in criminal subterfuge since the supposedly higher cause was to “get” Trump?

These questions continue to loom during what’s looking like increasingly perilous times.

The nation’s economy is drifting in the direction of recession. Inflation is rising sharply. A bipartisan Washington is investing enthusiastically in a proxy war with an erratic country led by an autocrat who commands the biggest nuclear arsenal on earth.

An aggressive effort meanwhile is being waged to abridge the First Amendment by imposing “content moderation” on free speech, a trend urged on by an aging president who seems at times confused and disoriented.

And now, topping it all off, a leak seeps out of the Supreme Court seemingly calculated to unleash political activism to bully the court’s jurisprudence on a pending case.

All of this occurs against the backdrop of a rising trade deficit of $125.3 billion, up 17.8 percent, and a record national debt, $30 trillion and rising, $90,000-plus for every man, woman and child — an arrangement favoring the affluent who can afford to invest in the bonds and treasuries by which Washington borrows its spending money. Troubling times indeed. What’s the chances any of these troubles will ever be honestly addressed if, as the case of the faked FBI court document indicates so far, even flagrant subversion of the fundamental rule of law is to be ignored with a shrug?