The immolation of McCabe has resulted in a moving of the focus to Mueller by both pro- and anti-Trump forces, for different reasons. The Democrats and their media allies desperately want Trump to fire Mueller, to keep the impeachment canard alive. The president will not oblige them, though he has made the point that there was no excuse for this inquiry, as there was no prior crime nor any evidence of collusion, and that it was weakly and reflexively created by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein after Attorney General Jeff Sessions gave a mistaken answer on a small Russia-related question at his confirmation hearings and recused himself on anything to do with Russia. Mueller is there only because Comey, after he was fired, illegally leaked a contested memo of a conversation with the president, as he acknowledged without embarrassment at a congressional hearing, to force the appointment of a special counsel on Russian matters (this despite his and McCabe’s assertions that there had never been government interference in the Russian investigation). Although Comey disparaged the Steele dossier, he and McCabe were complicit in allowing that dossier to be used as the basis for an illegally obtained and renewed FISA warrant against Carter Page, and for precipitating the Mueller inquiry. It is a reasonable supposition that what is terrifying the Resistance now is that the real scandal (as a number of us have been laboriously reciting at intervals for more than a year) is the corruption of the FBI and the Justice Department.

All now awaits the inspector general’s report on the internal functioning of the FBI and the Justice Department. If, as Senators Charles Grassley (R., Iowa) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) and others have urged, he says he needs a special counsel or the powers of one, to get to the bottom of all this, he will have it, as the monstrous fraud that these people can be relied on to monitor themselves won’t wash even with the media. If his report is damning enough, and it is unlikely to be pleasant reading for Comey and his claque, there will be an irresistible public and congressional demand to clean the stable and prosecute the apparently guilty, including in the intelligence services and the State Department.