We all know that President Trump is given to hyperbole. Given his background as showman and real estate impresario from New York City, it would be rather silly to expect him to not bring into politics the superlatives that are the coin of the realm in building a brand and fending off the wolves at the door. So yesterday, no long after Attorney General William Barr revealed that “spying” had been directed against the Trump campaign and that it had been carried out by several agencies, President Trump had this to say

“This was an attempted coup. This was an attempted take-down of a president. And we beat them. We beat them.

“So the Mueller report, when they talk about obstruction we fight back. And do you know why we fight back?

“Because I knew how illegal this whole thing was. It was a scam.

“What I’m most interested in is getting started, hopefully the attorney general, he mentioned it yesterday.

“He’s doing a great job, getting started on going back to the origins of exactly where this all started.

“Because this was an illegal witch hunt, and everybody knew it. And they knew it too. And they got caught. And what they did was treason.”

While the “reason” thing is a bit much, it is hard to draw many conclusions from what we now know about the Mueller investigation and not see it as a tool that was created by James Comey for the express purpose of causing the impeachment or resignation of President Trump.

Whether there was someone calling the shots behind the scenes, or whether the antipathy towards Trump was so great in the senior ranks of Obama loyalists and fanbois that a lot of people acted toward a common purpose, there is no doubt that the Trump campaign was targeted for surveillance and infiltration by the FBI and by, seemingly, foreign intelligence services who were, presumably, working in some way in cooperation with the CIA.

What might have started out as legitimate, in their view, concerns about the contacts of some members of the Trump campaign with various Russians, the objective quickly stopped being an investigation of facts became a narrative creation exercise that was used in an attempt to delegitimize the Trump administration.

Once the Mueller investigation was in place, instead of expeditiously arriving at a yes/no answer of the Russia question, Mueller’s team dragged out the process for over 670 days while taking actions calculated to give the impression that there was, in fact, connections between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This extended even to the point of deliberately taking out of context documentary evidence in the “statement of offense” issued when George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators to give the impression the Trump campaign was seeking Russian contacts when, in fact, they were avoiding it.

While a coup usually calls to mind the image of soldiers seizing the executive residence and means of communications, what happened to President Trump was just as damaging to our form of government. A handful of officials with the power to direct the activities of law enforcement and intelligence agencies carried out surveillance on the Trump campaign and on his transition team. They attempted to insert informants and agents provocateur into both the campaign and transition team. And they conspired to create an investigation that has as its sole purpose to remove President Trump from office. That was a much an attempted coup as anything that happens on a given Thursday in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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