Story highlights Fareed Zakaria: The power to use the state to put someone in jail should not be used in partisan ways

The United States has gone too far down the road of criminalizing public policy, he says

Fareed Zakaria is host of CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS," which airs Sundays at 10 a.m. and 1 p.m. ET on CNN. The views expressed are his own.

(CNN) There are so few details provided by FBI Director James Comey that it is impossible to know what to make of his decision to inform Congress about new emails relating to Hillary Clinton's server. The timing is unfortunate, since Justice Department guidelines expressly advise its officers to be careful not to do anything through action or announcement that could interfere with elections or the democratic process.

It also raises a larger issue. The United States has gone too far down the road of criminalizing public policy. When your opponents do something wrong, even profoundly wrong, in politics, it is often best to treat it for what it is -- bad judgment, bad policy, bad ethics -- and make the case to the electorate to hold those people accountable. It should not be standard practice to instantly begin searching for ways to treat that behavior as criminal.

Fareed Zakaria

This has been a bipartisan problem. When Democrats controlled the legislature under the Reagan administration, they turned the Iran-Contra affair into a legal matter, which resulted in the appointment of an independent counsel, years of inquiries, and bitter partisan divisions.

Then came the Clinton years, when this zeal exploded. The investigations of Bill Clinton consumed public attention, cost tens of millions of dollars, and resulted in an impeachment that was totally unrelated to the alleged original offense, Whitewater, on which no charges were ever filed.

I realize that in some of these cases, laws were broken or circumvented and people should be held accountable for that. But when you appoint special prosecutors with unlimited mandates and budgets, who inevitably define success as finding a crime, you are changing the basic codes of Anglo Saxon law.

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