Re: the charge of weaponizing government: That shoe seems to better fit the folks currently waxing indignant over the Mueller report aftermath

As Jim Geraghty of National Review says, it's no longer a conspiracy theory when the New York Times is doing a deep dive on Most-Equal-Comrade-period FBI spying on the Very Stable Genius's presidential campaign.

Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist offers ten takeaways from the NYT story. They are

1. FBI officials admit they spied on the Trump campaign.
2. The NYT and the "mainstream" media in general are terrified about the upcoming Inspector General's report about it and wanted to get out front.
3. There's still no evidence of collusion with Russia/
4. Four Trump affiliates were spied on.
5. There were wiretaps and at least one spy.
6. The government's been leaking information about its own informant.
7. The story has some basic factual errors.
8. The view of certain FBI personnel that an "insurance policy" was needed holds up even though they thought a Trump victory was a remote possibility.
9. The story tried to soft-pedal the spying claim as much as possible.
10. Politicized intelligence is a thing.

I would like to use this occasion to say that there are some more conservatives, who I have respected a great deal, and with whom I share a distaste for much about the Very Stable Genius, that they are starting to sound like the first wave of those who let that assume front-and-center status among their concerns, the ones who cast their bona fides to the wind and became - well, leftists, or at least softies for leftism. Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Bill Kristol. This second wave had not been going that far and had continued to argue against signing on to the Trump cult following from an unreservedly conservative standpoint. But in the last day or so, I've seen a lot of these people on Twitter start to make excuses for spying. "The-FBI-would-have-been-remiss-not-to" and so forth.

No. Without a clearly articulated charge, and enough probable cause to quickly amass some evidence (which, per the Mueller report, they were unable to do), we set a precedent for law-enforcement tactics with regard to presidential campaigns that cannot come to good.

Now, with all that said, it does look like this is something to dig into:

Ukraine's embassy wrote that a Democratic National Committee (DNC) insider reached out in 2016 seeking dirt on President Trump's team, according to a bombshell new reportThursday that further fueled Republican allegations that Democrats were the ones improperly colluding with foreign agents during the campaign.

Ambassador Valeriy Chaly said DNC contractor Alexandra Chalupa pushed for Ukraine's then-President Petro Poroshenko to mention Paul Manafort's ties to Ukraine publicly during a visit to the U.S., and sought detailed financial information on his dealings in the country, The Hill reported. At the time, Manafort was Trump's campaign chairman.

"The Embassy got to know Ms. Chalupa because of her engagement with Ukrainian and other diasporas in Washington D.C., and not in her DNC capacity. We’ve learned about her DNC involvement later," Chaly said in a statement released by the Ukrainian embassy. "We were surprised to see Alexandra’s interest in Mr. Paul Manafort’s case. It was her own cause. The Embassy representatives unambiguously refused to get involved in any way, as we were convinced that this is a strictly U.S. domestic matter."

Chaly continued: "All ideas floated by Alexandra were related to approaching a Member of Congress with a purpose to initiate hearings on Paul Manafort or letting an investigative journalist ask President Poroshenko a question about Mr. Manafort during his public talk in Washington, D.C."

As Hemingway and others - the WSJ's Kimberly Strassel comes to mind - have said, that's the reason for the circus in the Senate this week. There's absolute terror about where the real action is regarding collusion.