As one Twitter wag put it, virtually the only ones not involved in the Trump-Russia collusion scandal turned out to be Trump and Russia. The release of Special Prosecutor John Durham’s final report into the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation exposed Stasi-style plotting between the Clinton campaign, the FBI and the Obama regime to first prevent, then knobble, Donald Trump’s presidency. This amounted to an attempted palace coup.

Yet the fix is in. No one has been charged and the key players will be chuckling smugly into their whiskies as a wave of disgust passes over those privy to the report’s details, both conservatives largely aware of the truth years ago, and those newly awakened by the forensic detail of this damning, four-year, $6 million probe.

Include among the latter CNN’s Trump-despising anchor Jake Tapper, who said the report exonerated Trump and was devastating to the FBI; never-Trump conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, who wrote: ‘It was a nefarious plan, enacted at the highest levels of government, to corrupt an election and undermine a presidency’ and legal eminence Jonathan Turley, who lambasted ‘the alliance of political, government and media figures behind arguably the greatest hoax in US history’.

The rot goes right to the top, and those involved knew from the beginning the Russia-gate hoax was a Clinton dirty trick. Then-CIA director John Brennan writes in August 2016 of briefing Obama and others of the Clinton campaign’s plan ‘to vilify Trump by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security services’. After years of denials, it emerged that the Clinton campaign had paid for the fake, Trump-smearing Steele dossier, and then marketed it in the corridors of power. Then came the Mueller investigation, the Horowitz report, two Trump impeachments, a cascade of court cases, raids and process charges against Trump associates, forests of newsprint and years of smears. Where the FBI downplayed Hillary Clinton’s email scandal and shut down four other Clinton probes, they treated Trump differently, Durham says, eagerly going after him despite no verifiable evidence. And the penalty? Here Durham turns mild, urging greater fidelity to the law. The FBI agrees, yes, there were missteps but they’ve changed lots of rules. But if they didn’t follow the rules first time around, why would they next time?

Some examples. When Donald Trump won in 2016, he tweeted soon after that his wires were being tapped. Much mockery ensued. Of course, we weren’t spying on Trump Tower, laughed then-FBI boss James Comey. As years passed it turned out that yes, the FBI had indeed wiretapped the new president’s campaign in Trump Tower but that wasn’t spying! Good lord, no! Spying is unauthorised surveillance, said Comey. What he did was authorised surveillance, not spying. So that’s alright. Durham adds the cherry on top by revealing emails from Comey to his staff hassling them for court orders so spying – ‘surveillance’ – could begin. The shameless Comey went on to write a book on ethical leadership.

A second example: former House Intelligence Committee chairman, Adam Schiff, propelled the Russia hoax for years, maintaining he’d seen direct evidence of Trump collusion with Russia, he couldn’t reveal it yet, but it was there for sure, he’d seen it. That evidence never surfaced, and Durham finds there was none. A GOP congresswoman is now trying to get ‘Shifty Schiff’ tossed from Congress.

Alas, this dismal catalogue of evil-doers now feel they’ve got away with it. These are not people who ever wanted to do the right thing, they just wanted to stop Trump. Ex-FBI lynchpins such as Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok are now all over friendly media saying the lack of prosecutions means what they did was no big deal. These moral pygmies think that because they broke the law legally, so to speak, using lies of omission and commission, delaying tactics, process failures, semantics, loopholes and every other trick in the bureaucrats’ book, they have won. But these plotters have destroyed the legitimacy of the FBI, which now stands corrupted, trashed the US claim to lead the free world, and engendered profound distrust and polarisation across the nation. Worse, having been unchecked, the FBI continues to punch down, ignoring Hunter Biden’s laptop which they have possessed since 2019, and the many claims of bribery and pay-to-play around the Biden family, and instead targeting conservatives, with censorship campaigns on Twitter recently exposed, and the vicious persecution of January 6 protesters continuing, many of whom still rot in jail.

The FBI has not always been this bad. After the shock of 9/11, however, the Patriot Act vastly expanded US law enforcement’s tools and the agencies are now massive, drunk with power and politicised, dubbed by some a 35,000-strong Praetorian guard running protection for Democrats. The actions of this cabal provide a prism for understanding the continuing lawfare against Trump. If all the cases currently up against him fail, they will simply find new ones. The war goes on.

Where this becomes relevant for Australia is realising the conformist groupthink behind US policies. The Durham report shows a one-party state running the US, with divergent views expunged, not considered. Such closed-minded thinking is more typical of totalitarian states, where courts of yes-men deny reality until it overtakes them. Witness the recent unhappy catalogue of US foreign policy blunders – forever wars in Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and now the proxy war in Ukraine, the all-but-admitted bombing of the Nordstream pipeline – and the flawed decision-making becomes more understandable.

The persecution rolls on. In heartbreaking testimony last week, three FBI whistleblowers told Congress how their lives had been crushed by the bureau in revenge for revelations such as deliberate inflation of domestic terrorism figures. GOP Rep. Harriet Hageman likened the FBI to the baleful Eye of Sauron, from Lord of the Rings, turned on the citizenry. Here’s my literary image. In The Old Man of the Sea, Sinbad the Sailor tells of being tricked into carrying an old man on his shoulders.

The monster clamps down hard in a deadly grip; unable to be dislodged, he rides Sinbad long and hard. The sailor gradually weakens, escaping only by getting the old man drunk. In the same way, parasitic elites are fixed fast atop the US power structure, sucking the lifeblood from the body politic, and no one has yet found a way to dislodge them.