“FBI Used Informant to Investigate Russia Ties to Campaign, Not to Spy,” read the headline on a lengthy New York Times story May 18.

“The Justice Department used a suspected informant to probe whether Trump campaign aides were making improper contacts with Russia in 2016,” reads a story in the May 21 Wall Street Journal.

So much for those who dismissed charges of Obama administration infiltration of Donald Trump’s campaign as paranoid fantasy. Defenders of the Obama intelligence and law enforcement apparatus have had to fall back on the argument that this infiltration was for Trump’s — and the nation’s — own good.

It’s an argument that evidently didn’t occur to Richard Nixon’s defenders when it became clear that Nixon operatives burglarized and wiretapped the Democrat National Committee in June 1972.

Until 2016, just about everyone agreed that it was a bad thing for government intelligence or law enforcement agencies to spy (er, secretly collect information?) on a political campaign. Especially a campaign of the opposition party. Liberals were especially suspicious of the FBI and the CIA.

Nowadays, they say that anyone questioning those agencies' good faith is unpatriotic.

The words “Deep State” evoke images of evil geniuses carrying out schemes in hollowed-out mountains with submarine entrances.

What if they’re not that smart, though? Just malicious?

The New York Times earlier this month reported that a joint interagency task force met at CIA headquarters beginning in the spring of 2016 to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. The task force attracted a group of acolytes that reads like the cast of characters in a Hollywood script about a ragtag band of rogues turned commandos.

In the top role was their temperamental leader, CIA Director John Brennan, adding a Lee Marvin-esque gravity to the production.

Also starring Peter Strzok, the love-struck FBI agent who bonded with his paramour Lisa Page via virulently anti-Trump text messages.

Add to the mix National Intelligence Director James Clapper, who once perjured himself before the United States Senate.  His skill-set would be particularly helpful to this group of misfits.

For comic relief there was FBI Director James Comey.  In Comey-world, it was never enough to just be a gumshoe detective enforcing mundane things like immigration laws.  He had to be saving the world in an epic battle against Russians.

Can you imagine what Mack Sennett, creator of the Keystone Cops, would have done with these characters?

The first thing I noticed when I walked into the Trump rally in Nashville last night (5/29) was that Trace Adkins was singing. Not bad! (Hey, it’s Nashville.)

The second thing I noticed was that Jim Acosta wasn’t smiling, virtually the only person in the auditorium who wasn’t. If you don’t like Adkins, either you don’t like music or your Trump Derangement Syndrome is so great you couldn’t even groove to Bach or The Beatles in their heydays. Too bad for Jim.

Which leads me to another Nashville moment. Being here in Music City, isn’t it high time for the right to take back the arts, or at least some decent part of them?

Why is it CBS, NBC, and ABC are all slavish soldiers of the moribund and increasingly boring Left? (Can you watch “Good Morning America” without feeling you are having your brains drilled?)

But enough diversion. Trump’s on.  Time to enjoy the show.

The 75-year-old post-war order crafted by the United States after World War II is falling apart. Almost every major foreign-policy initiative of the last 16 years seems to have gone haywire.  And not because Trump wrecked it.

Donald Trump’s presidency was a reflection, not a catalyst, of the demise of the foreign-policy status quo. Much of the world now already operates on premises that have little to do with official post-war institutions, customs, and traditions, which, however once successful, belong now to a bygone age.

Historic forces have made post-war thinking obsolete and thereby left many reactionary “experts” wedded to the past and in denial about the often-dangerous reality before their eyes.  This is true everywhere you look – from Turkey to Russia to China to the European Union, not to mention North Korea and Iran.

The “experts” deny the reality while America’s president sees it clearly – which is why they hate and fear him so much.

Italy’s pro-euro elites have overreached disastrously. President Sergio Mattarella has asserted the extraordinary precedent that no political movement or constellation of parties can ever take power if they challenge the orthodoxy of monetary union.

He has inadvertently framed events as a battle between the Italian people and an eternal ‘casta’ with foreign loyalties, playing straight into the hands of the insurgent Five Star ‘Grillini’ and anti-euro Lega nationalists. He unwisely invoked the specter of financial markets to justify his veto of euroskepticism.

Taken together, his actions have made matters infinitely worse.  First the background, then what’s happening right now.  Italy has had 65 governments since WWII, so political chaos is almost the norm – but this is bizarre even by Italian standards.

Yet this crisis has been wholly manufactured by Berlin, Brussels, and the EU power structure.  They may have made a mortal blunder.

The “Deep State” is in a deep state of desperation.

It is hard to see how a yearlong investigation of this won’t come down hard on former FBI Director James Comey and perhaps even former Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who definitely wasn’t playing mahjong in a secret “no aides allowed” meeting with former President Clinton on a Phoenix airport tarmac.

With little time left before the Justice Department inspector general’s report becomes public, and with special counsel Robert Mueller having failed to bring down Donald Trump after a year of trying, they know a reckoning is coming.

With this report on the way and congressional investigators beginning to zero in on the lack of hard, verified evidence for starting the Trump probe, current and former intelligence and Justice Department officials are dumping everything they can think of to save their reputations.

Here’s how that is backfiring.

On December 29, 2016, the Obama Administration – with three weeks remaining in its term – issued harsh sanctions against Russia over supposed election interference.  Two compounds in the United States were closed and 35 Russian diplomats were ordered to leave the country.

Russia responded by calling the actions “Cold War déjà vu.”

In the two years that have elapsed since, it has been learned that the “intelligence” that formed the basis for the sanctions was beyond dubious.

As a dog that chases its tail, the fake “intelligence” was being used to cause the investigation which itself lent credibility to the notion of Russian interference.

James Comey’s FBI and John Brennan’s CIA thumbed the eye of an armed nuclear state based on false intelligence.  Why?

Many liberals and critics are under the mistaken belief that President Trump is violating the rule of law and civil liberties by criticizing the Robert Mueller investigation and by ordering the Justice Department’s Inspector General to investigate whether or not the FBI spied on his 2016 presidential campaign.

In fact, the president is behaving totally lawfully, and it is Robert Mueller and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein who are acting unconstitutionally and who are violating Trump’s civil liberties.

As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week (5/13), Robert Mueller’s appointment is unconstitutional under Chief Justice Rehnquist’s majority opinion in Morrison v. Olson. In this investigation, Mueller is acting like a U.S. attorney, who is a principal officer and who must be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

The unconstitutionality of Mueller’s appointment renders everything he has done since May 17, 2017, unconstitutional as well.