by: Kimberley Strassel, read in 2019

53 "...the FBI did something it had never done before, breaking perhaps one of the biggest rules of all: It launched a counterintelligence investigation into a domestic political campaign."
62 "All this guaranteed that no one other than the incoming Clinton administration would ever know how the FBI had spied on the Trump team.
Trump's victory destroyed this scenario, bringing with it an alarming new FBI reality: Within a few months a Republican president would know all the gory details. That reality brought with it a panic and a high-stakes FBI and Obama administration strategy-to take down or disable a new president."
73 "Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen wrote: "Ponder the irony: These geniuses were so appalled by Trump sharing sensitive intelligence with the Russians that they shared even more sensitive intelligence with the media-and thus the entire world-in order to demonstrate that Trump cannot be trusted with sensitive intelligence. In doing so, these leakers possibly did far more damage to U.S. national security-and intelligence sharing between the United States and Israel-than anything Trump may have revealed to the Russians.""
80 "The 25th amendment was passed...to be used only after demonstrated evidence of impairment, witnessed by those closest to a president. It doesn't exist to settle political differences, or to allow scheming bureaucrats to nullify an election and decide who sits as president. The very conversation was an affront to the Constitution and another example of how an elitist political and media class has continued to pose a greater threat to norms than anything Trump is known to have done."
163 "...the speed with which Democrats rejected each of Trump's picks did real damage to the integrity of the judiciary. They cast aside all the traditional metrics that we normally use to vet judges-intelligence, experience, reputation-in favor of bald political criteria. That approach reinforces the dangerous and growing public view that judges are political actors-partisans who are incapable of fairly adjudicating legal disputes. Nothing Trump has ever done as a candidate or in office has approached the damage these Resistance antics have done to the judicial branch."
188 "The Resistance, in its passion to block the president, set a new low in the nominations process, destroyed Senate traditions, and undermined the judicial branch. The damage will prove far more lasting than Trump's occasional jabs at individual judges or rulings."