Because he won his wings in the first film, Clarence isn't supposed to be a part of this story, but a closet conservative on the screenwriting team slips him in.
Although he now has his wings, Clarence still believes in George Bailey and is determined to set him straight. So he flies to earth and takes the Baileys on a tour of the East Bloc, showing them the Iron Curtain, the Gulags, the slums of Moscow, the bread lines, etc. to show him what the Communist paradise that the Baileys have come to admire is really like. Then he takes them into the future, to 2013, to show them an America that is slipping into Communism before bringing them back to 1949.
Angry at being deceived, George Bailey marches into the hearing room and to Potter's surprise, rats out all of his Communist front allies. In the process, he exposes a major Soviet espionage operation.
Meanwhile, Lewis Fulton IV, a crusading investigative reporter, has learned that Rep. Potter is actually on the payroll of the GRU, the Soviet Main Intelligence Administration, and that his anti-Communist stance is all a ruse to get access to classified documents. The movie ends happily as Potter goes to Federal prison and the Baileys become heroes for bringing down a Red spy ring.
Posts #26 & #32....BRILLIANT!
(You put entirely too much thought into this, haven’t you?) :)