In the Chinese calendar, 2017 was the Year of the Rooster.  Actually, it was the Year of the Fire Rooster.  In the political calendar, 2017 will go down as the Year of Collusion.  Even before election night 2016 ended, there were rumblings about Russian collusion in the presidential campaign.  Then, faced with the prospect of a President Donald Trump, James Comey (born in 1960, fittingly in the Year of the Rat), selectively leaked his private memoranda, by his own admission, to induce the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate all things Trump, under the guise of an investigation into Russian interference in the election.  Now, the FBI had been investigating alleged Russian collusion at least since June of 2016, and had found no link between Trump and any Russians.  After about 9 months of  effort by special counsel Robert Mueller, and his merry band of Hillary loving prosecutors, there is still no link of Trump with Russians.  Sure, they indicted Paul Manafort and another guy for things that happened 10 years before Trump decided to run for office.  Sure, they trapped General Flynn into a half-assed misstatement so they could charge him with a Martha Stewart offense.  That’s it.  And yet on and on it goes.  When Mueller was appointed, many people questioned how Mueller, a close friend and former law partner of Comey, could ethically run an investigation when Comey is an essential witness therein.  It was bad enough before we began learning of the utter corruption of the FBI and large portions of the Justice Department.  It was bad enough before it came to light that there really was Russian collusion that no investigator seems willing to investigate.  It now is crystal clear that Hillary Clinton’s campaign paid millions of dollars for a phony intelligence dossier on Trump.  The payments were laundered through campaign lawyer Mark Elias, but what it amounts to is the first actual crime that took place in the 2016 election.  Namely, Hillary paid intelligence sources from two foreign countries, Great Britain and Russia, that’s right Russia, for a pack of lies.  The Democrats, of course, don’t see it that way.  It was just opposition research, they say, and here’s the thing- if that was the only thing the dossier was used for, they might have a point (assuming paying foreigners to influence the U.S. election isn’t a crime).  But, we now know that the dossier, that came into the hands of James Comey, likely directly from the Hillary campaign, was used for much more than just opposition research.  You see, the dossier came from Fusion, GPS.  The wife of the Justice Dept. lawyer responsible for getting FISA Court surveillance warrants worked for Fusion.  A coincidence; not likely.  Congressional Committees have been asking various FBI witnesses for weeks whether the Fusion dossier was the “evidence” used to get the FISA warrants that permitted the Obama Justice Department to conduct electronic surveillance on the Trump campaign and transition.  As this is written, no FBI witness has provided an answer, and repeated demands to see the evidence presented to the FISA Court have been ignored.  If the answer was “NO,” one would think we would have had a denial from the FBI long ago.  So we are left with a nightmare scenario in which the Democrats paid an ex-British spy to concoct a dossier, reportedly written by intelligence sources in Russia, the FBI took it from the Democratic candidate, failed to verify anything in the dossier, and then used it to get court orders that permitted Obama operatives in the Justice Dept., the FBI, and various intelligence agencies to spy on the campaign and the transition team of the Republican candidate/President, and the Republican President is the person who is under investigation.  On top of this insanity, we have 95% of the media cheering on the Trump witch hunt, and totally uninterested in the truth, which is that the agencies on which we rely for impartial justice are corrupt and can no longer be trusted.  (More about this next week).  And thus ends the Year of Collusion.  We can only hope that 2018 is the Year of the Truth.