ROGER KIMBALL: Pursue Those Indictments! “As I have been saying for a couple of years now, this is the biggest scandal in American history. It dwarfs Watergate. Indeed, it challenges the fundamental integrity of our democratic—i.e., accountable—institutions. It challenges, too, the sacrosanct ideal of the separation of powers. Finally, it challenges the presumption of basic fairness and open competition without which our republic could endure in name only. . . . Some people think that it would be best if we put this whole episode behind us, that we sharply limit any investigations into wrongdoing and that, especially, we refrain from punishing the highly placed actors who leaked, lied, and conspired against the president. I am not of their number. What just happened in the United States represented an existential threat to the integrity of our institutions. It happened because highly placed individuals had cultivated a sense of entitlement and presumption of higher virtue—what James Comey called a ‘higher loyalty’—which they believed exempted them from the constraints and procedures that the rest of us must observe. They broke the law because they believed that they answered to a ‘higher’ law. Out of such convictions are revolutions born and countries destroyed.”

Once, the FBI fought organized crime. Then the FBI became organized crime.