Andrew McCarthy didn’t coin the term “Obamagate,” but he might just as well have. The onetime chief United States attorney and current contributing editor for National Review has been following this scandal for a long time. In his most recent book, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, McCarthy succinctly summed up the biggest political scandal in American history: “In 2016, the incumbent Democratic administration of President Barack Obama put the awesome powers of the United States government’s law-enforcement and intelligence apparatus in the service of the Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential campaign, the Democratic party, and the progressive Beltway establishment.”

By way of an update — and perhaps a “told you so” — McCarthy added in a riveting op-ed this week, “The Trump-Russia investigation was a politically driven fraud … opened on false pretenses, sustained by investigative abuses, and will undoubtedly end in recriminatory angst, which is what happens when the kind of accountability the victims demand does not, indeed cannot, come to pass.” In a continuance of his book’s “stinging indictment,” McCarthy lays out a thorough indictment of the major players, but also adds insight on the strategy employed by those who wanted to neuter a presidency before it even began.

On that topic of deep-state chess, McCarthy explains, “It was … vital for his antagonists to sideline Michael Flynn and Jeff Sessions, Trump loyalists with deep experience in intelligence and law enforcement, who could have put a stop to the farce if they’d remained, respectively, national security adviser and attorney general.”

Sadly, the scandal now finally being pieced together was one hatched four long years ago — compare that to how quickly we moved from a bungled break-in at a Washington hotel to the downfall of a president who was about to be impeached and likely convicted of a cover-up. From its start to the resignation of Richard Nixon, Watergate barely lasted two years.

The America of 2020, however, is one that cries out for justice on a number of fronts: justice for George Floyd; justice for those who’ve been victimized by the rioting in George Floyd’s name; justice for the victims of the Communist Chinese government, whose duplicity allowed the coronavirus to race around the globe; justice for the American businesses who’ve been crushed by government lockdowns and “safer at home” orders.

With all that, and the prospect of electoral change in the air despite the cognitive decline of the presumptive Democrat nominee, the scandal involving Joe Biden’s former boss may well be swept aside — making it more and more likely that McCarthy’s pessimistic prophecy will be a self-fulfilling one.

Yet the impact of Obamagate reaches far beyond simple retributive justice. Without a corrupt outgoing administration sowing the seeds of discord and the willing blindness of the mainstream media leading them to avoid rigorously fact-checking the budding Trump-Russia-collusion story, perhaps Republicans would’ve been more ambitious with their legislative agenda. Sure, we got those tax cuts, but we also could’ve ripped out the last vestiges of ObamaCare and replaced it with a better system, and we could’ve made progress on trade, immigration, and government reform.

In addition, it’s clear that the constant media drumbeat of “scandal” in the Trump administration created the so-called “blue wave” in 2018 — a House takeover that could have been averted with the switch of just three out of a hundred voters from Democrat to Republican. Certainly the modern Republican Party has always governed with the headwind of an antagonistic press corps, but keeping the House would’ve kept Nancy Pelosi bottled up as minority leader and kept the likes of Adam Schiff and Jerrold Nadler from their all-powerful “oversight” positions. And so on and so forth.

The biggest tragedy in all this, though, is what McCarthy calls “recriminatory angst.” We as a nation have learned the hard way that there are now two systems of justice: one for the elite and well-connected, and another for the rest of us. To find Lady Justice peering out from beneath her blindfold with pre-tilted scales is a disappointment, regardless of your injury or slight, and it’s a subject desperately in need of attention.

The mainstream media has chosen to ignore Obamagate, but McCarthy’s passionate study lays bare an injustice that, if not rectified, will have by far the largest long-term negative impact.