What emerges from the records before the Senate Judiciary Committee is not a tidy scandal, but a system that seemed to bend whenever power demanded it. Money from foreign interests and a U.S. defense contractor flowed toward the Clinton Foundation while Hillary Clinton oversaw the State Department, yet the very agents tasked with tracing influence and corruption were reportedly warned off the trail. A Little Rock probe was closed, not completed, leaving behind the sense that some doors were never meant to be opened.

Then the intelligence files from the Crossfire Hurricane era stripped away the last comforting illusion. Russia, the specter used to explain 2016, had not altered vote totals, even as Washington chased Trump–Russia angles seeded by Clinton campaign operatives. Now the focus turns inward: what senior officials like Brennan and Comey knew, when they knew it, and why the machinery of justice moved for some—and froze for others.