Andrew C. McCarthy outlines how leftists weaponize investigations:
Democrats turn impartial fact-finding into taxpayer-funded opposition research.
The Left ruins everything.
That’s because the Left stands ready to eradicate any norm at any time if there is political advantage in it. The latest to be cast aside are the precepts that we never tolerate unbridled, abusive investigations, nor do we abide full-blown criminal investigations without solid evidence that a crime has been committed — and even then, we demand adherence to time-honored limits.
In the probes of Donald Trump and, now, Brett Kavanaugh, these norms have been wiped away by the simple expedient of rebranding criminal investigations. Now the sleuths are unleashed under the guise of “counterintelligence” and “background checks” — whatever pretext is needed to get their foot in the door. Once they’re in, the earth is to be scorched, as if the crime of the century had occurred.
Of course, we want criminal investigators to be aggressive. But that has always meant aggressive within strict parameters. These are dictated by the degree of certainty that a crime has been committed, and by due-process rules with which the FBI must comply or be held to account when the case gets to court.
By contrast, when the Left criminalizes political opposition, no crime is required; just gossamer-thin, incoherent, uncorroborated, often unverifiable allegations: perhaps multiple-hearsay innuendo against a Republican presidential candidate, passed on by anonymous foreigners to a hyper-partisan, left-wing foreign spy working for the opposition Democratic political campaign. Or maybe a 36-year-old claim of sexual assault by an alleged victim who cannot remember basic details or keep straight the details she claims to remember; whose named witnesses do not back her account; who declines to address whether her accusation has been influenced by the controversial psychotherapeutic process of “recovered memory”; who refuses to disclose highly relevant therapy notes and polygraph information; and who is a Democrat advised by a prominent Democratic strategist and represented for free by Democratic activist lawyers, who were recommended to her by a senior Senate Judiciary Committee Democrat even as that Democratic senator concealed the sexual-assault claim from her Republican counterparts.
Read more: National Review
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