OPINION:

Newly published records validate suspicions about the previous administration’s vendetta against conservatives. When Democrats held sway in Washington, it didn’t matter whether someone was a Catholic schoolteacher or the president of the United States. This was war.

Sen. Rand Paul, Kentucky Republican, provided the FBI case file of Christine Crowder as an example. It is a detailed account of the two years President Joseph R. Biden’s minions spent trying to imprison a woman after she attended a rally with then-outgoing President Trump on the Ellipse.

Mrs. Crowder never made the trip down Constitution Avenue to take part in the rowdy Jan. 6 Capitol gathering that gave liberals an excuse to start rounding up the opposition. When a snitch said otherwise, G-men leapt into action, believing the bogus allegation premised on nothing more than a video clip from the ABC News website.

Without corroborating anything, the feds placed Mrs. Crowder on the Transportation Security Administration watchlist in July 2021. The FBI’s domestic terrorist unit surveilled her home and obtained search warrants to snoop on her electronic communications.

In July 2022, the Justice Department formally accepted Mrs. Crowder’s case for prosecution on this baseless pretext. It wasn’t until May 2023 that agents interviewed the suspect, who handed over receipts confirming she returned to her hotel room after the presidential speech.

Even if Mrs. Crowder had been at the Capitol, the video in question featured a lady “walking in front of the statute [sic] of Winston Churchill” before leaving the building while “waving to the crowd.” Nobody was harmed or threatened. That would hardly constitute an offense worthy of federal indictment.

A comparable disregard for the value of verification pervades Jack Smith’s recently released deposition transcript. The illegally appointed special counsel conceded he had no proof of Mr. Trump’s supposed legal violation, yet he still thinks his quest to jail the GOP presidential candidate was legitimate.

“President Trump and his associates tried to call members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election,” Mr. Smith said.

The president’s expression of doubt about the validity of an anomaly-filled election cycle wasn’t felonious. Or, if it was, the same standard should have been applied to Hillary Clinton’s insistence that the 2016 election was stolen. An honest prosecutor wouldn’t have said, as Mr. Smith did, that Mr. Trump’s words weren’t protected by the First Amendment because “fraud is not protected by the First Amendment.”

Unless he’s clairvoyant, there’s no way Mr. Smith could establish that Mr. Trump “knowingly” made false statements. The cagey lawyer also downplayed the significance of his “Arctic Frost” investigation, which delved into the phone logs of over a dozen GOP lawmakers, opening a trove of information revealing sensitive conversations with reporters and whistleblowers.

To gather this political intelligence, Mr. Smith and his comrades ignored the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause protections and kept the courts in the dark about his targets. “I think the Department guidance on that issue has changed since these events we’re talking about. And so now if one were to do that, you would notify the judge,” he admitted. How convenient.

Democrats played fast and loose with the rules, assuming their hanky-panky wouldn’t come to light. In 2020, as in 2016, partisan operatives presumed their side would prevail and incriminating papers would be sealed by allies. Voters had different ideas.

The facts uncovered thus far bear out the need to compensate victims of Justice Department harassment.