“No one is above the law” was the favored mantra of Democrats as they relentlessly chased after Donald Trump throughout his first presidency, seeking to undermine him and prevent any chance of his return to leadership.

They unleashed a barrage of assaults: fabricating intelligence to paint him as a Russian asset, utilizing the FBI and DOJ against him, impeaching him, deploying dubious prosecutors, concocting baseless civil suits against him and his family, and attempting to imprison and financially ruin him—all while lying and maligning his character.

If that didn’t bring him down, two assassination attempts would have finished off a lesser mortal. 

Despite their persistent efforts, Trump’s Democrat/Deep State adversaries failed dramatically. They severely damaged their own party and tarnished the reputations of the intelligence agencies and mainstream media partners who supported their unscrupulous tactics.

As the saying goes: If you come at the king, you best not miss. 

Now accountability is afoot. 

‘Illegitimate president’ 

On Thursday, Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed pit bull lawyer Ed Martin as a special attorney to lead investigations of New York AG Letitia James and California Sen. Adam Schiff for potential charges including mortgage fraud, bank fraud and wire fraud, which carry jail terms of up to 30 years. 

Grand juries in Virginia and Maryland are currently weighing criminal indictments against the two Trump-deranged Democrats over allegations they falsified property records to secure favorable loan terms. 

The Albany US attorney has also reportedly issued subpoenas in a separate civil rights investigation into James, including into whether her office violated Trump’s rights in a lawsuit she brought against him. 

James has sued Trump, his children and his businesses dozens of times. She ran for office vowing to “take on” the man she called an “illegitimate president.” 

For his part, Schiff abused his position as House Intelligence Committee chairman to manipulate and distort intelligence to damage Trump. He created false narratives about Trump’s connections to Russia and Ukraine, which led to his first impeachment. 

Schiff has been the most enthusiastic Democrat to use the phrase “No one is above the law.” 

Now he’s about to find out the hard way. 

Meanwhile, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has spent months extracting documents from hidden reaches of the intelligence agencies and declassifying them, against the wishes of embedded Deep Staters at the CIA and FBI whose ruse is to redact documents to the point of indecipherability. 

Too bad. Gabbard went to the White House to overrule these resistance guerillas and successfully expose the truth about Russiagate and Barack Obama’s role as “ringleader,” to use Trump’s word. 

We now know that on Dec. 9, 2016, Obama directed his national security officials, DNI James Clapper, CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey and others to create an intelligence assessment with the foregone conclusion they all knew to be false: that Russia had influenced the 2016 election to help Trump win. 

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“Documentation that came from the Obama White House; documentation that came from Obama’s ODNI; documentation from the CIA, all of these pieces fit quite seamlessly together creating a very clear timeline that shifted from before the election when the intelligence community almost uniformly said essentially that Russia is trying to sow discord in the US election, but has no preference for one candidate over another,” Gabbard told me last week on Pod Force One. 

“And then all of a sudden, Trump wins the election, surprising many people, both here and abroad . . . [and the Obama officials falsely claim] that Russia aspired to help Trump get elected, or that Russia hacked the election in favor of Donald Trump, really trying to discredit President Trump’s win and give a big middle finger to the American people who had just voted him into office,” she said. 

“President Obama, unhappy with the outcome of the election and making the appearance of a peaceful transition of power and claiming to be the champion of democracy, and yet launch[ed] what we now know . . . was a covert mission to subvert the will of the American people, create this lie that would challenge the legitimacy of President Trump’s election . . . resulting in what was truly a yearslong coup,” she said. 

Gabbard believes that the only way to stop such a travesty happening again is to punish the wrongdoers. 

“Accountability has to take place,” she said. “We’ve referred all the documents we have found and will continue to refer them to the Department of Justice for a criminal referral.

“AG Pam Bondi has created a strike force team . . . focused singularly on [bringing] accountability to those who are responsible for this,” she added. “We also have to recognize that [Brennan and Clapper] have their own disciples . . . and many of those people still exist within the intelligence community now. So, in these documents that we’re finding, we are uncovering names of people who were involved with this Russia hoax, this manufactured intelligence document, [who] would otherwise never be known publicly.” 

Accountability equals deterrence. It’s why we have jails. 

Without punishment, wrongdoers are emboldened. 

They regard mercy as weakness to be exploited. That’s the lesson we take from the behavior of Trump’s antagonists over the last nine years. 

‘Lock her up!’ 

Despite efforts to paint Trump as a vengeful madman hellbent on retribution, the truth is clear from his first term: His tendency is to let bygones be bygones. 

He won in 2016. He didn’t feel the need to drag his vanquished opponent through the mud even though at his rallies his supporters would regularly chant: “Lock her up!” 

“We had Hillary Clinton down for whatever we wanted to do with her, but I felt it was inappropriate,” Trump told me in Scotland two weeks ago. “She was the wife of a president. She was a secretary of state, and we could have done a very big number [on her. But] the concept of putting her in jail, indicting her, all the things that you have to do, it’s tough stuff. And I said, ‘We don’t want to do that.’ ” 

He showed Hillary mercy because he wanted the country to “heal” from the discord of the Obama years. 

“And yet they did it to me,” he said, confessing to feeling “a little bit” angry after his mercy was rewarded by being dragged through the mud for years. 

“So I feel differently. I mean, I’m a human being. I have my feelings too,” he said. “Obama, what he did was terrible. What Brennan did and Clapper and Comey and all these lightweights . . . did was so unnecessary. And they made it really hard. 

“We had a great first term,” Trump said. “But it certainly made it . . . less comfortable.” 

Trump and his current administration understand the need for heads on pikes to act as a deterrent and ultimately to restore public trust in our national security institutions. 

Now the hunters are the hunted. Every tool is being used to find wrongdoers and bring them to account in a lawful, systematic, administration-wide effort. 

At least some plotters are sure to see inside a jail cell. None will sleep easy.