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And not only did then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch meet with former President Bill Clinton on a tarmac in the middle of the election cycle and the investigation of his wife; Lynch’s Department of Justice allowed Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s top aide, to claim attorney-client privilege. As Andrew McCarthy of National Review pointed out at the time, Mills was involved in the scrubbing of over 30,000 emails, yet the DOJ “indulged her attorney-client privilege claim, which frustrated the FBI’s ability to question her on a key aspect of the investigation.” Furthermore, Mills was allowed to sit in on Clinton’s interview with the FBI as Clinton’s lawyer.

And herein lies the problem for the DOJ and the FBI.

Let’s assume, for a moment, that everything they’re doing now is totally honest and aboveboard — that there’s no attempt to “get” President Trump and they’re just following where the evidence leads. Many conservatives will rightly point to the DOJ and FBI treatment of Hillary Clinton, and state that the agencies ought to be consistent in their application of the law and leave Trump alone. Or they’ll suggest that Trump ought to turn those agencies into personal defense organizations, as former President Obama did.

Once supposedly neutral organizations are made partisan, a return to neutrality looks partisan. That means that the FBI and DOJ damn well better have gold-plated evidence against Cohen; they better not leak ancillary information damaging Trump to the press; and they better have dotted all their i’s and crossed all their t’s.

If not, there will be hell to pay, not merely for those agencies but for a country that can no longer trust its own law enforcement agencies.