When it comes to narratives, conservatives have been completely outmaneuvered by the left. For the past several years, liberals have written obsessively about the “insurrection” of January 6, 2021. This, as everyone knows, was when a bunch of rioters broke into the Capitol building while protesting the election results.

It was a dumb thing to do, to be sure. Real rioters deserve punishment. But they don’t need to be locked away for years. Their demonstration also wasn’t the most despicable thing to happen in America in the last few decades, as the media would have you think.

That honor goes to a date that the left wants buried: January 5. 2017.

Hey, Let’s Nullify the Election!

That was the day when President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates and FBI head James Comey met in the Oval Office and plotted to nullify the 2016 election.

It was on January 5 that the Democrats decided to spread the phony story that Donald Trump was a Russian agent. It was ludicrous, it was ridiculous, and it crippled Trump’s presidency. As far as sheer national destruction it was far worse than the riot of January 6 could ever be.

The problem is that whereas January 6 was an action-packed event that offers video and bright colors, the meeting on January 5th was held in secret at the White House. It also can be a complicated story with a lot of moving parts. The best examination of the plot against Trump is Andrew McCarthy’s book Ball of Collusion: the Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.

McCarthy, a lawyer and a writer for National Review, does a good job simplifying what is a briar patch of names, dates and federal agencies. I also trust McCarthy because he admits he initially thought that Russiagate turning out to be a mere hoax was “inconceivable.” He is not easily swayed by unorthodox theories. Then he started doing his research.

The Deep State in Service of the Clinton Campaign and the Obama Machine

What McCarthy found is still shocking. Boiled down to its essence: the Clinton campaign, eager to change the subject from Hillary’s criminal behavior, compiled a phony dossier claiming that Trump was “colluding” with the Russians. McCarthy notes that

Russia had not actually interfered in the election; it interfered in the campaign by publicizing stolen mails and peddling propaganda, most of which was too ridiculous to influence anyone… . But let’s not quibble over a good story, which [on January 5 2017] was then being composed.

The FBI and intelligence agencies got warrants to spy on the Trump campaign using flimsy and laughable “evidence.”

Of course, they all knew that there was no way that Trump was ever going to win the 2016 election, so the fake story and the players involved would become irrelevant once Hillary was coronated.

Oops, the People Didn’t Obey Orders

Except that didn’t happen. Trump won. Faced with the possibility that the new President Trump would unmask the plot, Obama, Hillary and the Democrats decided to launch an investigation of the president himself. After all, they now had to justify Crossfire Hurricane and its unjustifiable warrants obtained through illegal means, plus the oppo-research fiction that they had been spreading,

That plot was put into place January 5, 2017. In Ball of Collusion, McCarthy explains that President Obama, VP Biden, Susan Rice and James Comey all had a choice. They could simply inform the incoming President Trump that, as in all campaigns in the recent past, places like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia had made feeble attempts to sway voters. In the case of Russia it wound up being around $5,000 in goofy Facebook ads.

The Stasi über Alles

Or they could make it personal. They could claim Trump himself was a Russian stooge. Better than admitting the truth, which could destroy the Deep State if exposed. McCarthy:

Trump would know that Obama’s Justice Department and the FBI largely based their suspicions — suspicions they took to a secret federal court — on unverified multiple hearsay and rumor mongering generated by the Clinton campaign. Simultaneously, it would be clear to Trump, these same officials were burying a criminal case against Clinton. One supported by such damning evidence of guilt that the plain language of criminal statutes had to be distorted to avoid enforcing them.

That’s quite a lot. So on January 5, 2017, they met in the Oval Office and hatched the plot. McCarthy:

Everything was finally in place to trigger the insurance policy: the plan to envelop the Trump presidency in an investigation the president would be powerless to end; the plan to portray Trump publicly as exactly the compromised tool of the Kremlin the Obama administration had been secretly telling the FISC he was. The plan would subject the new administration to close monitoring by unaccountable bureaucrats, while politically devastating intelligence leaks made Donald Trump a one-term president, if not less.

Three Years of Treason

So James Comey left the meeting and “briefed” President Trump on the fake Russia nonsense, then leaked the meeting to the media, which spent three years trying to destroy the innocent and newly elected President of the United States. The intelligence agencies set up Trump staffers like General Flynn. Liberal savior Robert Mueller wasted three years and millions of dollars to conclude that there had been no collusion, but the damage had been done.

The left is going to yell and scream about the “insurrection” of January 6 for decades. It’s propaganda and nonsense. The real crime was on January 5. Never Forget.

Mark Judge is a writer and filmmaker in Washington, D.C. His new book is The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs the New American Stasi.