They calumniated the dignified professor in front of her parents, calling her a liar, a fantasist, an erotomaniac and a vengeful scorned woman. I remember chasing Arlen Specter, the usually moderate Republican from Pennsylvania, down the hall of the Russell Senate Office Building after he slandered Hill as a perjurer.

Priding himself on his comity with his Republican colleagues, Biden set up the rules to favor Thomas.

First, Hill says, he reneged on a promise to let her testify first. Then he agreed to go along with Republicans’ contention that the judge’s behavior outside work was not relevant, which prevented testimony about Thomas’s taste for porn.

Yet Biden let Orrin Hatch, the Republican Savonarola from Utah, imply that Thomas could not possibly know the vocabulary of porn and suggest that Hill had gotten the pubic hair line from “The Exorcist,” which she had never read. (This, even though reporters had Thomas’s list of porn rentals from a local video store.)

Biden was striving to be “fair” to his vicious, duplicitous Republican colleagues who were jamming an arch-conservative liar onto the Supreme Court.

Comey also got tangled up on the issue of fairness, with disastrous results. Afraid that he would be blamed if it was discovered that the F.B.I. had been secretly investigating the woman expected to be the next president, the then-F. B.I. chief violated his own agency’s norms to announce that he was reopening the inquiry into Hillary Clinton’s emails on the cusp of the election.

But he did not tell the public that the F.B.I. was also looking into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. As The Times has now revealed, the F.B.I. was worried enough to set up a honey trap, sending a comely government investigator posing as a research assistant to draw out George Papadopoulos , a Trump campaign adviser, in a London bar.