THEY THOUGHT THEY’D GET AWAY WITH IT, AND THEY THOUGHT THEY’D BE REWARDED FOR THEIR MALFEASANCE: Victor Davis Hanson: Hillary’s ‘Sure’ Victory Explains Most Everything.

The traditional way of looking at the developing scandals at the FBI and among holdover Obama appointees in the DOJ is that the bizarre atmospherics from candidate and President Trump have simply polarized everyone in Washington, and no one quite knows what is going on.

Another, more helpful, exegesis, however, is to understand that if we’d seen a Hillary Clinton victory in November 2016, which was supposed to be a sure thing, there would now be no scandals at all.

That is, the current players probably broke laws and committed ethical violations not just because they were assured there would be no consequences but also because they thought they’d be rewarded for their laxity. . . .

If we consider the mentality of government elite careerists, we see that the election-cycle machinations and later indiscretions of Strzok and Page were not liabilities at all. They were good investments. They signaled their loyalty to the incoming administration and that they were worthy of commendation and reward.

Hillary Clinton’s sure victory certainly also explains the likely warping of the FISA courts by FBI careerists seeking to use a suspect dossier to surveille Trump associates — and the apparent requests by Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and others to read surveilled transcripts of Trump associates, unmask names, and leak them to pet reporters. Again, all these insiders were playing the careerist odds. What we view as reprehensible behavior, they at the time considered wise investments that would earn rewards with an ascendant President Hillary Clinton.

Yep.