“[W]e ought to deprecate the hazard attending ardent and susceptible minds, from being too strongly, and too early prepossessed in favor of other political systems, before they are capable of appreciating their own.” —George Washington (1795)

Based on my daily communications from the Democrat National Committee, it is clear that Party Chairman Tom Perez thinks his rank-and-file constituents are idiots. He is probably right to the extent that Democrats depend on an uninformed constituency.

Case in point would be how Perez frames the latest indictments of Russian operatives who, in 2016, did what communists have been doing since the Russian Revolution — undermining democracy wherever it exists. In this case, they’ve undermined American voter confidence in our election process.

In February, a federal grand jury returned indictments against 13 Russians and three Russian entities for attempting to sway public opinion through social media, coordination with unwitting U.S. activists, and having a hand in the organization of some political rallies.

The latest indictments, a product of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, names 12 more Russians, including those responsible for hacking the DNC servers (which the DNC refused to turn over to the FBI after the fact). At the time of the hacking, it was fair to assume the Russians and Chinese were behind it and that one or both countries were also in possession of all the “missing” emails from Clinton’s insecure off-grid email server.

All of the indictments were for actions that occurred under Barack Obama’s watch — actions he chose to largely ignore. As Intelligence Committee Demo Sen. Mark Warner (VA) declared in the latest hearings on the matter, “Our collective response was inadequate to meet Russia’s escalation.” That is an understatement.

The announcement of the latest indictments was timed to coincide with Donald Trump’s meeting today with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Though some suggest the announcement undermines Trump’s meeting, I believe the opposite is true — that it betters Trump’s negotiating position with Putin, as he stated Friday.

I applaud this aspect of Mueller’s investigation — but predictably, Perez has attempted to recast the indictments in support of Democrats’ withering and now thoroughly discredited claim that Trump conspired with Putin to defeat Hillary Clinton.

In fact, it was Clinton’s campaign that orchestrated the Russian collusion charade. With a little help from a handful of her corrupt, politically motivated FBI managers — most notably Peter Strzok in concert with FBI Director James Comey — Clinton managed to get a special counsel appointed after Trump’s election in order to keep the collusion charade alive.

Significantly, in Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s announcement of the indictments, he made clear, “There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime. There is no allegation that the conspiracy altered the vote count or changed any election result.”

So how did Perez spin these indictments out for his constituents and his media propaganda machine?

According to Perez: “This is not a witch hunt and it’s certainly not a joke, as Donald Trump has desperately and incorrectly argued in the past. Trump and his Republican enablers’ efforts to discredit these established facts only embolden Putin’s Russia and invite further attacks on our country.”

In fact, Donald Trump has never called the investigation into Russia a “witch hunt.” He has repeatedly called the investigation into collusion between his campaign and the Russians a “witch hunt,” which it is. The collusion that should be investigated is the Clinton- and DNC-funded fake Trump dossier produced by Fusion GPS and its Russian agents.

Perez insists, “The American people deserve to know the truth, and the special counsel’s investigation is ongoing.”

On this point, we can agree, and Perez and his Beltway MSM echo chamber should start by telling the truth.

After Trump’s meeting with Putin, Perez declared, “Trump stood next to Russian President Vladimir Putin and took Putin’s side over America’s. It’s easy to get desensitized to the horror of Donald Trump, but this was truly a shocking moment. Never before has a U.S. president failed so spectacularly to stand up to a hostile foreign power. (SEND MONEY)”

It’s amusing to watch the head of the Socialist Democrat Party claim Trump is not tough on socialists! To refresh Perez’s selective memory, here is what it looks like when a U.S. president capitulates to Putin. Obama and Clinton colluding with the Russians….