Michael Flynn is free, but we are not free from Michael Flynn

Flynn has been groomed for years by Trumpworld to become the central martyr figure in the Trump 2020 presidential campaign

“Human scum,” Donald Trump calls them.

“Dirty cops,” says House Intelligence ranking member Devin Nunes.

They’re referring, of course, to the former top brass at the FBI and longtime Justice Department lawyers who for the last three years had been pursuing felony charges against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn for lying to law enforcement about meeting in 2016 with then-Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak.

Yes, had been pursuing.

On Thursday, the Justice Department dropped its case against Flynn, arguing that apparently it could not prosecute the retired three-star general for a crime to which he has pleaded guilty twice previously.

DOJ said in its court filing that it had concluded Flynn’s 24 January 2017 interview by the FBI that led to his guilty plea was “untethered to, and unjustified by, the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation into Mr Flynn” and that it was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

For those reasons, Flynn is free to go.

But if you’ve followed presidential politics at all since Trump took office, you know that we, the public, are not free from this story.

That’s because Flynn has been groomed for years by Trumpworld to become the central martyr figure in the Trump 2020 presidential campaign’s Gospel of Distrust.

Evil, as defined by that gospel, comes mainly in three forms: the Deep State, the Fourth Estate, and the communist Chinese state.

They are to blame for all our woes, so sayeth Donald Trump.

The Deep State saddled us first with the Russia hoax, then the Ukraine hoax, which resulted in impeachment. The communist Chinese state has the blood of 75,000 Americans (and counting) on its hands after covering up the severity of the coronavirus outbreak while stocking up on medical supplies from the rest of the world. And the Fourth Estate constantly lies about the president in order to abet the other two in undermining his America First agenda.

That’s the 2020 message — victimhood and vengeance.

"The truth is that the Deep State and some senior Obama administration officials set up Flynn in hopes of using him and others to cripple the Trump presidency from the start," Flynn's deputy at the National Security Council in 2017, KT McFarland, wrote in a recent Fox News column.

Flynn is the president’s new poster boy of how to fight back — and win.

Democrats are, naturally, apoplectic about DOJ's decision to drop the case against Flynn, with House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler calling for the department’s inspector general to probe the matter and announcing he will try to bring Barr before the committee to get answers “as soon as possible.”

“The decision to drop the charges against General Flynn is outrageous,” Nadler said in a statement on Thursday, adding that the evidence that Flynn lied to the FBI is “overwhelming” and that Flynn admitted to it in court twice himself.

“Now a politicized and thoroughly corrupt Department of Justice is going to let the President’s crony simply walk away. Americans are right to be furious and worried about the continued erosion of our rule of law,” Nadler added.

This is not the beginning of the end of Flynn’s saga. It’s merely the end of the beginning. And now that Trump appears to have the upper hand, it’s about to get a lot uglier.

On Thursday, Trump, schoolyard bully that he is, was predictably one of the first people to say, “I told you so,” calling Flynn an “innocent man” and saying he believes the former general is now an “even greater warrior.”

Never mind that it was the president’s self-appointed attorney general who appeared to orchestrate the demise of his own department’s case against Flynn; or that DOJ’s lead prosecutor in the case, Brandon Van Grack, seems to have withdrawn in protest at DOJ’s decision to drop it.

And never mind that the FBI’s interview of Flynn about his contacts with Russia — which, according to the DOJ filing on Thursday, was not “material” to any investigation — was in fact part of the bureau’s then-ongoing counterintelligence investigation into contacts between the country and Trump’s campaign and transition teams.

None of that context matters for Trump’s 2020 reelection aims because context never matters for Trump.

He was right, the Deep State was wrong, and Obama’s Justice Department holdovers should be locked up for “treason,” a crime punishable by death — at least that’s what he and his campaign surrogates will be telling their Fox News audience on a loop now through 3 November 2020.

Different year, same playbook.

And Flynn’s the star quarterback.