Will Hillary apologize for the biggest hoax in US political history?

The full consequences of the great political hoax of our time — the charge that former President Donald Trump was colluding with Russia — aren’t yet fully apparent. Yet they are surely serious. 

We have heard from many Democrats and those in media that Trump’s claims that he actually won the 2020 presidential election tend to delegitimize the government and distort the political process. They have a point. It’s a stretch to call the streaming of Trump supporters into the Capitol on Jan. 6 an “insurrection,” but as I wrote at the time, Trump’s words that day “were uttered with a reckless disregard for the possibility they’d provoke violence that any reasonable person could find impeachable.”

But Trump isn’t the only losing candidate who has cast doubt on an election result recently. While he has faced the derision of most of the media and the disagreement of some in his party, that wasn’t true of the utterly baseless charges that Trump colluded with the Kremlin.

 The Russia collusion hoax now seems to be unraveling, but we have yet to see many confessions of error from Democrats or their friends in the press.

The latest in the unraveling comes in special counsel John Durham’s indictment of Democratic lawyer Michael Sussmann for lying to the FBI general counsel when he denied he was acting “for any client” in forwarding bogus documents that supposedly showed communications between Trump’s business and a Russian bank.

Sussmann is entitled in court to the presumption of innocence. But the facts alleged in the 27-page ­indictment are powerful evidence of a concerted attempt by Hillary Clinton’s campaign, including those reporting to the candidate herself, to delegitimize the candidacy and, after his surprise victory, the presidency of Trump by false charges.

“Here is where the prosecutor appears to be going,” wrote former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy in these pages. “The Trump-Russia collusion narrative was essentially a fabrication of the Clinton campaign that was peddled to the FBI (among other government agencies) and to the media by agents of the Clinton campaign — particularly, its lawyers at Perkins Coie — who concealed the fact that they were quite intentionally working on the campaign’s behalf.”

The agents include the investigative firm Fusion GPS and the purported Russia expert Christopher Steele. During the campaign, the FBI obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act wiretapping warrant on Trump adviser Carter Page and therefore gained access to the whole campaign. After Trump took office, an FBI lawyer lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to renew the warrant. He was indicted by Durham and pleaded guilty, though astonishingly was given no jail time.

The Clinton campaign’s duplicitous encouragement of an FBI investigation…