by Stu Cvrk
In the space of two weeks in October, federal agents searched the Washington residence of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) under a judge’s warrant, and two former senior FBI officials surrendered on charges that they lied to Congress about the Bureau’s Hunter Biden investigations. Furthermore, former FBI director James Comey is fighting a federal indictment in North Carolina and, as of October 26, a third set of federal charges in Washington accusing him of directing a classified leak to the press. Former CIA director John Brennan’s own lawyers have disclosed that prosecutors formally told him he is a grand jury target.
The response from Democrats has been a single word, repeated at every podium: weaponization. One hundred seventy-five of them even issued a joint response complaining about the “weaponization of law enforcement” after a pre-dawn FBI raid was conducted on the Washington, D.C., residence of Ilhan Elmi (Omar) under a warrant signed by a Democrat-appointed judge who donated to the Clintons. The evidence must be strong with that one, Obi-Wan!
The Democrats’ charge deserves a hearing, and this article gives it one near the end. But a party that discovers the dangers of prosecutorial power only when that power changes hands is not making an argument from principle. It is making an argument from a political position. The record over the last five years shows why, and it is longer than most people remember.
What Their Silence Covered
Start with January 6. Nearly every one of the roughly 1,400 people charged faced the “parading” count, a petty misdemeanor carrying up to six months. At least 114 of those convicted of it went to jail, for terms from seven days to the full six months, despite being first-time offenders. Some judges went beyond what prosecutors asked: Judge Tanya Chutkan gave two cousins who walked in and took selfies 45 days when the government sought 30. Hundreds more were charged with a felony obstruction statute that the Supreme Court in 2024 held reaches only tampering with records and evidence. Even Biden-appointed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined that majority. The chorus now warning about prosecutorial overreach had little to say.
Then President Trump’s advisers. Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon were each convicted of contempt of Congress for defying the January 6 committee, a charge rarely brought against a president’s senior aides asserting privilege. Both served four months in federal custody. Navarro, then in his seventies, reported to prison after the department insisted his appeal raised no substantial question. The department has since abandoned his conviction, and in April 2026 the Supreme Court vacated Bannon’s conviction and sent it back for dismissal.
Jeffrey Clark, a senior Justice Department official in 2020, drafted a letter urging Georgia to examine election irregularities. It was never sent. He has spent six years defending his law license over it; the Democrat-dominated DC disciplinary board recommended disbarment in July 2025, and the matter is still pending.
Then President Trump himself, and his family. In August 2022, the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago, the first search of a former president’s home in American history. The resulting 40-count case was dismissed in 2024 when Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that Special Counsel Jack Smith had been unconstitutionally appointed. In Manhattan, DA Alvin Bragg turned what would ordinarily be misdemeanor bookkeeping counts into 34 felonies by tying them to an unspecified second crime; the conviction drew an unconditional discharge and remains on appeal. New York AG Letitia James, who campaigned on pursuing Trump, won a civil fraud judgment against him and his two eldest sons that ballooned to roughly half a billion dollars; an appellate panel threw the penalty out as excessive in 2025. In Georgia, Fulton County DA Fani Willis was removed from her racketeering case over a romantic relationship with the special prosecutor she personally hired, and her successor dropped the case, saying Georgians would not be served by five to ten more years of it.
The pattern reached ordinary citizens, too. Douglass Mackey was convicted for posting a vote-by-text meme in 2016; the Second Circuit acquitted him in 2025, finding the government had not shown he even saw the chats that supposedly made him a conspirator. In 2023, Mark Houck, a Catholic father of seven, was arrested at his home by armed agents over a sidewalk shoving incident outside an abortion clinic. A jury acquitted him, and the government later paid him more than $1 million to settle his lawsuit. The FBI’s Richmond office produced a memo treating “radical-traditionalist Catholics” as a domestic extremism concern; a 2026 Justice Department review found its staff had opened investigations into two priests and kept revising the memo after headquarters ordered it deleted.
Each of these was defended by the Democrat-media complex, in its moment, as the “neutral application of the law.”
The Cable Chorus
The newsrooms have reversed course as sharply as the politicians. When Alvin Bragg indicted President Trump in 2023, MSNBC legal analyst Charles Coleman called it a “very American story” of justice served, and contributor Jason Johnson told Joy Reid that Trump’s long escape from accountability had been a sickness on the country. After the January 6 indictment, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes faulted AG Merrick Garland not for overreach but for moving too slowly. The indictments were also good business: Vanity Fair called the Georgia indictment night MSNBC’s Super Bowl when the network drew more viewers than Fox News and CNN combined.
The network now calls itself MSNOW, and its register has changed. Reporter Ken Dilanian described the Omar search as “a very, very intrusive search” of her personal property. On Morning Joe, the search was called deeply unorthodox and concerning, and Joe Scarborough labeled Republicans hypocrites for their own past complaints about weaponization.
CNN traced the same arc. A long 2025 feature casts Comey as caught in the jaws of Trump’s “campaign of retribution.” On the night of the “86 47” seashells indictment, a guest on Anderson Cooper’s program said the president’s appetite for retaliation had no limit, and the next morning Audie Cornish opened her show by asking whether the case was solid or a rush to please the president.
Some of those questions are fair. But where was that skepticism when Bragg stretched bookkeeping misdemeanors into 34 felonies, when armed agents arrested Mark Houck at his front door, or when first-time parading offenders were sent to jail? A press corps proves its principle only when its doubts about prosecutors survive a change of defendants.
Reciprocity, Accountability, Justice, and Rule of Law
Let us examine each of these factors.
Reciprocity. The Biden years established new rules. A former president can be indicted, and his home can be searched. Senior White House aides can go to prison for defying Congress despite the long-held precedent of presidential privilege. False testimony to Congress is something prosecutors pursue. Reciprocity is not revenge; it is applying those same rules to the people who wrote them. A rule that binds only one party is not a rule at all. It is a weapon, and the people now complaining about weapons are the ones who forged these.
Accountability. The laptop case is the clearest example. According to the criminal complaint, Bradley Benavides told Congress he learned the FBI possessed Hunter Biden’s laptop by reading Wikipedia in 2023, while records show he discussed it with Bureau officials before the 2020 election. Nikki Floris testified to the Foreign Influence Task Force that she helped lead and had no role in the Biden investigations; the complaint says she took part in a classified briefing on that very case. These are allegations, and both are presumed innocent. But the laptop the FBI sat on while dozens of former intelligence officials suggested it bore the hallmarks of Russian disinformation turned out to be authentic, and prosecutors later used it in Hunter Biden’s own criminal cases. Perhaps there will be superseding indictments for alleged election tampering, too.
The House Judiciary Committee’s referral of John Brennan rests on a similar charge: that he told Congress the CIA opposed using the Steele dossier when declassified records show he pushed to include it. And Comey’s first indictment, over his 2020 Senate testimony, was dismissed because of how the prosecutor was appointed, not because a court found his testimony truthful.
The newest Comey case goes to the same question. Charges unsealed in federal court in Washington last week accuse him, under the Espionage Act and a conspiracy count, of directing an individual through one or more co-conspirators to pass national defense information to a reporter at a national publication in October 2016 while he was FBI director. These are allegations, not findings, at this point, but they fit a documented habit. In 2017, Comey told the Senate that he had given the contents of his own memos about the president to a friend to pass to the New York Times. An FBI director who uses the press as an instrument of policy is exactly the kind of official accountability should reach.
Justice. Justice is not the same thing as punishment. It is the correction of injustice, and it runs in both directions. Some of the Trump administration’s most consequential moves have been undoing, not prosecuting. DOJ abandoned its defense of Navarro’s conviction, cleared the way for the Supreme Court to vacate Bannon’s, and paid Mark Houck more than $1 million to settle his lawsuit. Each is an admission that the government got it wrong. A department willing to admit error is doing what justice requires, and it is something the Biden DOJ rarely did.
Justice also means institutional repair. The Foreign Influence Task Force at the center of the laptop case was disbanded in February 2025, and the FBI personnel behind the Richmond Catholic memo have been removed from their positions. Dismantling the units and removing the partisans who abused power does more to prevent a repeat than any single indictment.
The rule of law. Equal application is the rule of law. It does not exempt a former FBI director, a former CIA director, or a sitting member of Congress. The Omar investigation did not begin with Trump’s return; the Biden Justice Department opened its own inquiry into her. The current probe concerns her family’s immigration paperwork, and it has proceeded through grand jury subpoenas and a judicially authorized warrant (by a Democrat-appointed judge, no less). Every defendant named here has lawyers, judges, and juries, and they are using all three. That is not the profile of a police state run amok, as the Democrat-media complex claims. It is the ordinary machinery of justice, finally pointed in more than one direction.
Concluding Thoughts
The deepest objection to the preceding commentary is to the principle of reciprocity itself. “They did it first” can justify escalation forever. That is true if reciprocity means pursuing political opponents because they are political opponents. It is not true if every case must stand on its own evidence before a judge and a jury. That is the standard this administration should be held to, and it is the standard Democrats declined to apply when the defendants were Trump’s people.
The test from here on is simple. If Floris and Benavides lied to Congress, a jury should convict them. If the seashells case is as thin as it looks on the surface, a judge should throw it out. If Comey directed a classified leak to the New York Times in 2016, a jury should say so. If Brennan’s testimony cannot be squared with the documents, a grand jury should say so. Let every case rise or fall in open court, on evidence, with every protection the defendants are owed.
What Democrats cannot do is claim the high ground on prosecutorial restraint. They had five years to defend it, from the jail cells of misdemeanor trespassers to the FBI search of Melania Trump’s underwear drawers at Mar-a-Lago, and they chose silence. The weaponization ledger they opened is simply coming due.
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Stu Cvrk retired as a captain after serving 30 years in the U.S. Navy in a variety of active and reserve capacities, with considerable operational experience in the Middle East and the Western Pacific. He is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, where he received a classical liberal education that serves as the key foundation for his geopolitical commentary.
