The Russian collusion hoax was never plausible

Victor Davis Hanson:

The entire Trump-Russia collusion narrative was always implausible.

One, the Washington swamp of fixers such as Paul Manafort and John and Tony Podesta was mostly bipartisan and predated Trump.

Two, the Trump administration’s Russia policies were far tougher on Vladimir Putin than were those of Barack Obama. Trump confronted Russia in Syria, upped defense spending, increased sanctions, and kept the price of oil down through massive new U.S. energy production. He did not engineer a Russian “reset” or get caught on a hot mic offering a self-interested hiatus in tensions with Russia in order to help his own reelection bid.

Three, Russia has a long history of trying to warp U.S. elections that predated Trump and that had earned only lukewarm pushback from the Obama administration.

It’s also worth remembering that President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Foundation had been recipients of Russian and Russian-related largesse — ostensibly because Hillary Clinton had used her influence as secretary of state under Obama to ease resistance to Russian acquisitions of North American uranium holdings.

As far as alleged Russian collusion goes, Hillary Clinton used three firewalls — the Democratic National Committee, the Perkins Coie law firm, and the Fusion GPS strategic intelligence firm — to hide her campaign’s payments to British national Christopher Steele to find dirt on Trump and his campaign; in other words, to collude. Steele in turn collected his purchased Russian sources to aggregate unverified allegations against Trump. He then spread the gossip within government agencies to ensure that the smears were leaked to the media — and with a government seal of approval.

No wonder that Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s partisan team spent 22 months and $34 million only to conclude the obvious: that Trump did not collude with Russia.
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I think Muller had to know that from the beginning of his investigation.  He used it to indict people for process crims and unrelated matters in hopes of extorting testimony against the President.  He was also attempting to entrap the President in an obstruction scam.