With great clarity, Andrew C. McCarthy just keeps churning out information-packed article after article on what we now are free to call Spygate. I don’t know how he does it, But I’m certainly glad he does. If you have any friends or family you’d like to get up to speed on the subject, just tell them to read McCarthy’s archives and then to keep following all his latest efforts as they come out.

Which brings us to today’s McCarthy piece, which raises a question I’ve often wondered about since this whole Trump-colluded-with-Russia thing began:

…You want to tell me about Paul Manafort’s collaboration with Kremlin-backed Ukrainian thugs? How about George H. W. Bush trying to persuade Kiev not to break away from Moscow, after which Clinton, Bush-43, and Obama enticed Ukraine to give up its means of self-defense on the false promise that we would protect them from Russian aggression ”” a promise premised on the pie-in-the-sky theory that there would be no Russian aggression?

In just the decade before Trump’s 2016 campaign, as the Putin regime menaced former Soviet satellites, the Bush administration negotiated and submitted to Congress the daft U.S.-Russia civilian nuclear cooperation agreement, endorsing the export to Moscow of technology, material, equipment, and components for nuclear research and nuclear power production. Russia’s invasion of Georgia ”” including the still-ongoing occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia ”” made congressional approval of this embarrassing pact politically impossible for a time. Yet it was revived soon enough in the Obama “reset” of relations with Moscow steered by then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton. Clinton promised an era of cooperation in counterterrorism and non-proliferation while Putin went merrily along backing nuclear-energy development and advanced military capabilities in Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of jihadist terrorism. Obama, of course, made nary a peep since he needed Moscow’s help to pull off the ludicrous Iran nuclear deal. As the Putin thug-ocracy rattled its saber, Obama ushered its entry into the World Trade Organization and pushed through the wayward “New START” treaty.

In the 2012 campaign, when Mitt Romney portrayed Russia as our principal geopolitical foe, Obama and Democrats mocked him. In the 2016 campaign, Trump’s Russia rhetoric was an echo ”” in Trumpian bluntness ”” of the Democrats’ position. Alas, they had nominated the candidate most ill-suited to exploit the Putin appeasement flavor of the Trump bid.

Mrs. Clinton, we’ve observed, was neck-deep in the Obama administration’s Uranium One scandal. Recall the $145 million that poured into the Clinton Foundation; the half-million-dollar pay day a Kremlin-connected bank ponied up for a short Bill Clinton speech (about five times more than Russia paid for those 2016 ads on Facebook, and more than ten times what the Kremlin’s propaganda arm, RT, paid for a 2015 speech by eventual Trump campaign adviser Michael Flynn); the Clintons’ meetings in Russia with Putin and Medvedev while the U.S. government was mulling approval of Russia’s acquisition ”” through its energy giant, Rosatom ”” of one-fifth of America’s uranium stock (in addition to more copious uranium reserves in Kazakhstan); the Obama Justice Department’s refusal to bring a prosecutable felony case against Rosatom’s American affiliate (Tenam USA) while the Uranium One deal was under consideration; and the same Department’s quiet resolution of the case on a sweetheart plea years later, after Putin’s annexation of Crimea and aggression in Eastern Ukraine (despite Obama’s plea for flexibility) had left Obama’s “reset” policy in shambles.

We could go on. The point, however, is that after 30 years of embracing and empowering Moscow, it is not credible ”” particularly for an administration that was among the worst offenders ”” to say, “We had to use spies and FISA surveillance against the Trump campaign due to suspicion that Trump might embrace and empower Moscow.”

There’s more, much more. Please read the whole thing.