After the Mar-a-Lago raid, the same familiar voices are once again insisting that we ought to give the DOJ the benefit of the doubt.

That’s Un-American. 

(These same folks don’t think the police officers in the George Floyd drug overdose case or the Breonna Taylor case, currently being lynched by Biden’s racist DOJ deserve that.)

The government doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt in our criminal justice system, the accused do. And there’s a big difference between respecting the integrity of the average law enforcement officer on the ground (which, for whatever it’s worth, I think stands above that of the average politician, but is certainly far from incorruptible) and the system that dispatches him and tasks him with certain missions. Lefties and Never Trumpers tiresomely continue to conflate attacks on law enforcement with a lack of credulity for a politicized system that calls the shots.

A political appointee, like AG Garland, approving a raid on a political opponent deserves zero of the benefit of the doubt and all the suspicion that can be mustered. The same would be true if a GOP AG had approved a raid on Hillary Clinton for that matter. Regardless of the guilt or innocence of the target, a raid on a political opponent should be assumed to be political until proven otherwise. And there would be a really high barrier to proving that going after your political opponents is apolitical.

AG Garland and his people had a way out of this. They could have turned the whole matter over to an independent investigation, even now they could appoint a special master to oversee the products of the raid. They’ve refused to do that. Those are not the actions of devoted civil servants following an investigation wherever it goes. They’re the work of political hacks looking to maintain control at all costs.

In China and Russia, the government gets the benefit of the doubt. Americans suspect their government. That’s the American way. It’s Un-American not to.