With the layers of corruption being peeled back from the illegal and unconstitutional collaboration between Deep State federal bureaucrats and a left-wing-driven "shadow government" (which is nothing less than a continuation of the worst elements of the Obama administration) we can expect to see a predictable gambit coming soon from the besieged forces: a scorched-earth retreat.

In war, a retreating army is loath to leave infrastructure intact and functioning for the use of an advancing enemy.  The essential utilities and infrastructure are destroyed during the retreat, forcing the enemy to lose valuable time repairing the damage, giving the retreating force more time to escape.

The evidence of a Deep State mentality among a significant portion of the permanent federal bureaucracy is unarguable.  All that remains unclear is to what extent that this mentality is directed and organized by the devotees of the outgoing administration and the leaders of the Democrat shadow government.

The malfeasance of the previous administration and its political allies is also unarguable, with only the full chain of command to be revealed: who knew what, and when, and what actions were undertaken at whose direction, and why.

The information at the heart of the #ReleaseTheMemo initiative (and its supporting documentation) will go a long way toward answering these questions, which will lead to prosecutions, and more revelations as the depth of corruption is brought to light.

Faced with their undoing, the criminals involved have only one defense at hand: they must so destroy the systems and processes by which they are being held to account as to create in the mind of the American people a sense that this is merely another tit-for-tat political squabble and not the most wide-ranging, anti-constitutional, Third World-worthy coup attempt in the history of self-government.

In the coming months, the "empire" will strike back, filing charges of their own through the Mueller investigation and through myriad other yet to be made allegations, which will originate from compromised bureaucrats within the federal agencies themselves.

The resulting investigations (and breathless reporting) will be without merit, but they will serve to generate fog, hopefully convincing the American people that the Trump administration is so corrupt that it is fabricating the information contained in the #ReleaseTheMemo memo to conceal its own wrongdoing.

In other words, the Deep State operatives will accuse the administration of doing exactly what they themselves are doing, and have been since before the election.

The result?  Scorched earth, where the American people, regardless of political orientation, no longer trust that any investigation of the government, conducted by the government, can be relied upon, regardless of evidence.

Of course, the Democrats' solution will be to put Democrats back in charge, to return to a time when government worked (for them) and the misuse of prosecutorial and investigatory power was rare and invariably the fault of Republicans.  This will be their narrative, and the fake news media will echo it without end.

Congressional Republicans must work in concert with the Trump administration to forestall the use of this tactic.  They need to exercise their oversight responsibilities in a serious manner and immediately hold accountable any bureaucrat who participates in the "resistance" mentality of the Deep State.

The best strategy against a scorched-earth retreat is rapid and overwhelming force.  Get moving, Republicans!  Now, before chaos swamps our government.