THE INVESTIGATIONS, AND THE SCANDALS – AT 10:50 A.M. ET:  Now that the Alabama election is out of the way, we can return to the major developments in the Washington "investigations" now underway.  The result is disturbing.  From IBD:

Election Meddling: With every new revelation, the "dossier" on President Trump, which got the entire Trump-Russia-collusion story going, looks more and more scandalous. Not because of what it reveals about Trump, but what it is revealing about behind-the-scenes efforts to ruin his presidency.

The latest twist involves a senior Justice Department official who was just demoted for his connection to it.

When the existence of the now-discredited dossier first came to light, it was described simply as information compiled by a former British intelligence operative with a high degree of credibility in the spy community.

The fact that a two-page summary had been presented to Trump and President Obama in early January lent it still more credibility. As one news outlet put it, the dossier was "credible enough to warrant inclusion of their claims in the highly classified report on Russian interference in the presidential campaign."

From that point on, it was treated as an authoritative report pointing to Trump's collusion with Russians to meddle in the U.S. election.

It was only much later — and long after its phony claims had been seared into the public's consciousness — that the truth about this dossier started to emerge.

And everything that we've learned since has seriously undermined its credibility, while raising troubling questions about how the FBI and the Justice Department under Obama used it.

The most explosive revelation was that the dossier was bought and paid for by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, a fact that the Clinton campaign took pains to hide, that Clinton officials lied about, and that Fusion GPS refused to reveal on its own. It wasn't an intelligence report at all. It was a political hit job paid for by Trump's opponent.

COMMENT:  Read the whole thing.  There is a major scandal brewing in Washington, and it isn't about President Trump.  It is about attempts to destroy him, even before he took office, with the collusion of federal officials. 

This, not Donald Trump, is a major threat to our democracy.  It will take time to investigate.  If the GOP loses control of both houses of Congress, those investigations may never take place.

That is the fix we are in.  But you'll never hear it on CNN.

December 13,  2017