This week started with more evidence: When Democrats arm the federal government against their political opponents, as the Republicans claim, they are doing very badly.

No wonder Republicans are firing blanks as they seek evidence of dirty deeds from the Justice Department and FBI, through their government’s specially created House Arms subcommittee. There’s no evidence.

The miracle, really, is that it’s not the Democrats who are having a stomach ache from the nation’s top law enforcement agencies and calling for “defense” other “destroy” the FBI. After all, Donald Trump might never have been president if a Republican FBI director hadn’t announced just days before the 2016 election that he had reopened an (ultimately doomed) investigation into Hillary Clinton.

The latest piece of evidence underlining the madness of Republicans’ complaints about a diabolical Democratic Deep State was this week’s lengthy Washington Post investigative article headlined: The FBI Defied Opening an Investigation for More Than a Year Trump’s role on January 6.

In all that time, of course, it was the appointees of a Democratic president, Joe Biden, who ran the Justice Department and the FBI and did not target Trump. The Post has provided new details about how Atty. General Merrick Garland and his deputy, Lisa Monaco, and other senior officials, were so obsessed with restoring public confidence in the department after its actual arming under Trump and his attorney general, William Barr, that they moved

only

belated, and even then cautiously, to scrutinize Trump’s actions. You couldn’t use the T-word, an unnamed Justice Department official told the Post.

Justice and the FBI finally moved into action after reporters and the January 6 House committee found evidence of Trump’s direct involvement in several plans to overthrow the 2020 election-busting state officials, his judicial appointees and his vice president and after a federal judge in a related case had found Trump likely to have committed federal crimes.

Only after feeling embarrassed did they start looking, another Post source said. FBI Director Christopher A. Wray, the Trump appointee being held by Biden (so much for Biden as commander-in-chief), waited 15 months to authorize an investigation into Republican conspiracy to replace some states with pro-Biden voters pro-Trump fakes. Prosecutors have heard no witnesses to Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state asking the official to find enough votes for Trump to win that state until

this

year.

The story was much the same in the separate investigation into Trump’s custody of highly classified documents, despite nearly two years of FBI notes and a subpoena to return their alleged crimes for which he was eventually charged. According to the Post, FBI agents resisted for months a last resort plan to raid Mar-a-Lago to recover material that the government had good reason to suspect was there. Some agents advocated taking Trump’s word that he had returned everything and dropping the case.

(Take Trump’s word? Who would?)

But most Republicans, even those who criticize Trump for his document mess, denounce the FBI and Justice Department for cheating him in some way. Take it from a (slightly) reformed Barr: “Trump’s impeachment is not the result of unfair persecution by the government. This is a situation that he caused entirely himself.” To suggest otherwise, Barr wrote this week, is “cynical political propaganda.”

here

another

reason Democrats rather than Republicans are the party with a beef against law enforcement agencies. In 2018, the FBI helped the Republicans effectively take control of the Supreme Court. At the behest of Trump and then-Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, a scheming Republican from Kentucky, Wray’s FBI investigated allegations of sexual assault against a candidate for the Supreme Court. Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh that was so limited in time (less than a week) and scope (for example, an eyewitness to an unreported assault was ignored) that it was hardly an investigation. The FBI had exonerated Kavanaugh and secured his confirmation.

Predictably, Republicans remained silent on the Post’s revelations, in contrast to the party’s message of demonic Democrats and Justice Department bias. But following Trump’s lead, they quickly pounced on the news Tuesday that the president’s son, Hunter Biden, had agreed to

pleading guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges and a plea to try him for tax and gun law violations. investigation into a gun violation.

A Trump super PAC slammed the agency for making a love deal, and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the Bakersfield Republican, demanded that prosecutors hand over their files to a Republican-led House committee to examine. But here, too, there were inconvenient facts: When Biden took office, he detained the Republican US attorney in charge of his son’s investigation, and the district attorney

has

had broad authority to snoop and dig into Hunter Biden’s conduct and business dealings. For five years.

The Republicans’ condemnation of the national law enforcement pillars is not only wrong, it’s unfortunately damn effective. The chilling effect of their harp playing is evident in the mad caution that Justice and FBI showed toward Trump. Even worse is the way Republicans undermine Americans’ confidence in the rule of law, all to score political points.

That is the government’s real weaponry.

@jackiekcalmes