The collusion house of cards has finally and fully collapsed. In a stunning turn of events Thursday, the Justice Department dropped its case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn. Exculpatory documents concealed by the FBI and federal prosecutors for more than three years showed that the retired Army lieutenant general never lied or committed a crime. The FBI knew Flynn did not collude with Russians. He is a patriot, not a traitor. The notion that candidate Donald Trump conspired with Moscow to steal the 2016 presidential election was always an implausible phantasm built on a foundation of Russian disinformation commissioned by the Hillary Clinton campaign and Democrats. The malevolent James Comey, fired director of the FBI, knew this but it didn’t deter him. He and his lieutenants sedulously stacked the cards, one by one, against Trump by exploiting the bogus allegations and pursuing an illicit investigation designed to drive him from office. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and his sycophants in the media propagated the Russia hoax by insisting there was “solid evidence” that Trump was a secret Kremlin asset and predicting the imminent demise of his presidency. Except no such evidence ever existed. Collusion was nothing more than an illusion and a delusion. Tragically, people like Flynn became collateral damage amid the carnage of corruption, dishonesty, abuse and injustice. But the weight of all the lies and propaganda has inexorably toppled the house of cards in a slow-motion crash. I have long argued in numerous columns and two books that the retired Army lieutenant general was set up and framed by Comey, FBI Assistant Director Andrew McCabe and disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok. They invented a perjury trap under false pretenses and deceived Flynn. Their goal was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.” They knew Flynn was innocent – and hidden records proved it. The two agents who interviewed him in January 2017 concluded “that Flynn was not lying.” Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his team of partisan prosecutors also knew Flynn was not lying, but they didn’t care. Utilizing the full force of the federal government and their unlimited resources, they intimidated and bullied an innocent man into pleading guilty to making a false statement. To accomplish this, they threatened to criminally charge Flynn’s son unless the father capitulated to their demands. That aspect of the coerced plea was hidden from the court when Flynn threw in the towel. He was financially ruined and his reputation shattered. He was forced to sell his home. Thanks to the intrepid work of Flynn’s new counsel, Sidney Powell, and a review of the case ordered by Attorney General William Barr, the ugly and unconscionable actions of the FBI and Mueller’s hit squad were uncovered and exposed. The distinguished retired three-star general has now been vindicated. In a recent column, I wrote that Flynn became “the victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice in modern times” and “he should sue the very people and government that persecuted him under the pretext of a legitimate prosecution. Let the litigation begin. Damages should run into the millions of dollars. Flynn deserves it. And the Justice Department should now consider whether crimes were committed by those who deliberately obscured the truth and arguably obstructed justice. Another card that fell this week came from the Office of Director of National Intelligence. The office notified Schiff that transcribed interviews of 53 witnesses who appeared behind closed doors before the House Intelligence Committee in 2017 and 2018 would be released to Congress and the public, despite Schiff’s best efforts for more than two years to bury the testimony. Why would the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who has demanded transparency from Trump, want to hide the truth about him? Because the declassified 6,000 pages produced not a scintilla of collusion evidence. Zero. Of course, Intelligence Committee Chairman Schiff knew this all along, since he questioned the witnesses. He just didn’t want the American public to know it, inasmuch as it completely undermined his false collusion narrative. “Schiff is in panic mode,” a senior administration official told Fox News. Not a single witness provided any evidence of collusion, according to two sources familiar with the transcripts. The transcripts utterly discredit Schiff and expose him as a poseur. For years during television appearances, Schiff professed to have uncovered the hobgoblin of a grand conspiracy involving Trump. Yet, he refused to offer any proof. He pretended that he was privy to evidence that he did not have. As I wrote in my book “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History: “The more Democrats and the media worked in concert to advance their hallucination that Trump had colluded with Russia, the more audacious Schiff became in his public denouncements of the president. He frequently insinuated that he had special access to damning information that few others could procure. Even after the House Intelligence Committee issued its majority investigative report concluding that it had all been a hoax, Schiff announced, ‘I can certainly say with confidence that there is significant evidence of collusion between the campaign and Russia.’ He produced no such evidence because it did not exist.” On CBS’ “Face the Nation,” Schiff ventured that Trump “may be the first president in quite some time to face the real prospect of jail time.” This claim was ludicrous, of course. Yet, Schiff was so heavily invested in the scam and the celebrity it brought him that there was no reversing course. He knew it was untrue. But like a guy with a counterfeit bill, he kept trying to pass it off to others. Schiff is living proof that the truth always has a nemesis. Still another card fell this week when the Justice Department belatedly made public the unredacted version of the so-called “scope memo” penned by then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein in August 2017 detailing the scope of Mueller’s Russia investigation. Rosenstein authorized Mueller to specifically target Trump campaign aide Carter Page for “colluding with Russian government officials with respect to the Russian government’s efforts to interfere with the 2016 election for President of the United States.” However, Rosenstein already knew that these allegations, based on the anti-Trump “dossier” –composed by ex-British spy Christopher Steele – had been discredited by the FBI. Seven months earlier, bureau agents had located Steele’s primary source of information. That source debunked the “dossier” as exaggerations and fabrications, according to the findings of Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz. At that point, the FBI should have shut down its probe. Instead, Comey persisted. When Comey was fired in May 2017, Rosenstein appointed Mueller to launch a new investigation – even though the deputy attorney general well knew there was no credible evidence that supported the appointment of a special counsel under federal regulations. Mueller knew this as well, since he was given the FBI files. On “Hannity” on Fox News on Wednesday, Senate Judiciary Chairman Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., stated that “the legal foundation to justify Mueller’s appointment in my view does not exist. … That’s why this (scope) memo is so important.” Graham is correct. The Mueller investigation was illegitimate from the outset, even though it eventually found no evidence of a collusion conspiracy. Rosenstein misconstrued – and thereby misused – the special counsel regulations. An “articulable criminal act” must first be identified. It must antecede the appointment, not vice versa. But when Mueller was appointed, the FBI had developed no such evidence. That was confirmed by Steele’s source, as well as the subsequent testimony of Comey and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page. The evidentiary premise of a crime was conspicuously missing. Thus, Mueller began his investigation in search of a crime, reversing the legal process mandated under the regulations. None of this seemed to matter to Rosenstein. He was determined to get rid of Trump. Evidence shows he plotted to secretly record the president and then use the recording as evidence to try to remove the president from office under the 25th Amendment. As a result, Rosenstein should have been disqualified from any involvement in the special counsel case. It was not possible for someone so noticeably antagonistic to the president to be an unbiased and neutral party overseeing that investigation. Not only was the naming of a special counsel unauthorized, but the FBI’s original investigation launched in July 2016 was improper. In an interview on Fox News last month, Attorney General William Barr called the three-year Russia probe “one of the greatest travesties in American history.” Barr made it abundantly clear that it should never have happened. He said: “Without any basis, they started this investigation of his (Trump’s) campaign, and even more concerning, actually is what happened after the campaign, (There was) a whole pattern of events while he was president … to sabotage the presidency … or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.” Barr has vowed “to get to the bottom of it.” With his appointment of Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham, the attorney general has committed his department to holding individuals accountable. “If people broke the law, and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted,” Barr promised. There is no doubt that Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Rosenstein, Schiff and a great many others were intimately involved in the scheme to sabotage Trump. They managed to initiate the Trump investigation with no evidence of a crime and then convince the country that an unparalleled investigation was necessary. Their phony collusion narrative was a conspiracy in and of itself, contrived as a political instrument and then weaponized by unscrupulous government officials. Now that their house of cards has collapsed, it is time for a reckoning.

Indeed..  LTG Michael Flynn, Ret., has been 100% exonerated, and this whole so-called Russia “collusion” has been proven to have been a complete hoax on the American people by corrupt officials at the FBI from James Comey on down, Hillary Clinton (and her campaign), the DNC, members of the dominantly liberal mainstream media, and many Democrat politicians hell bent on bringing down Trump no matter the cost.  And, in the process, lots of these people committed crimes.  Now it’s time for payback.  Hopefully Sidney Powell and the rest of Flynn’s very capable legal team are working on that.  The man is owed millions..and that’s just the civil side of things.  Lots of these folks should go to jail.  We’ll, of course, be keeping a close eye on this developing story.  Thanks to Gregg Jarrett for his spot on legal analysis.  He was one of the few legal commentators in the media that has been right about this story all along.

Gregg is a Fox News legal analyst and commentator, and formerly worked as a defense attorney and adjunct law professor. He is the author of the No. 1 New York Times best-selling book “The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump.” His latest book is the New York Times bestseller “Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History“