There are very few American political figures more intertwined in Presidential history than Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and in the shadow of the January 6th Committee hearings, the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago has brought the whole sorry saga full circle in an infuriatingly ironic way.

The longer the affair drags on, the more inexplicable it becomes in its timing, legitimizing the grievances and perceptions that many Americans have against the permanent bureaucracy.

It is difficult for myself personally to hear so many full-throated declarations that “no one is above the law,” and take them seriously. After all, the loudest voices calling for the former president’s head were the same ones clutching pearls every time a capacity crowd at a Trump rally shouted for him to “lock her up!”

The most galling thing about all of this is how politically they approached both candidates in 2016. While getting the ball rolling on the discredited “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation, some of these same FBI agents were slowing the roll of their dive into an obvious attempt to hide Secretary Clinton’s communications from federal record retentions rules, which compromised thousands of classified documents in the process.

If James Comey and Loretta Lynch had followed through in 2016 in the same way their current counterparts are in Wray and Garland, this nation and the world may have been spared from the Trump Timeline altogether.

Sure, it would have meant derailing Clinton, but it would’ve given Senator Bernie Sanders the chance to truly sell his ideas and vision of Democratic Socialism to the nation. Polling at the time reflected a huge advantage for Sanders in a head-to-head against Trump, becoming one of the great “what if” election matchups in living memory. Instead, superdelegates and the legally undemocratic Democratic National Committee elevated her, to the detriment of the voters, and even Clinton herself.

The national media reported on the story begrudgingly, spending more time parroting lines about “yoga and Chelsea’s wedding,” and dismissing anyone concerned about what might have been on it, let alone the fact that Clinton had used the server in the first place.

Rather than performing their duties free of the influence of fear or favor, the FBI agents approached Clinton as though she already was their boss. For some it was no doubt because they wanted her to be. That isn’t a guess on my part. It’s something we know. We have seen their emails and text messages.

In fact, taking possession of the infamous server proved to be a very low priority for the FBI, who approached it like a procrastinating college student. Not once did the FBI raid or search Clinton’s property, working instead with Clinton’s lawyers almost hand in glove. Investigators went as far as to offer toadies in Clinton’s inner circle like Cheryl Mills immunity, which is a far cry from the early morning raids of Trump associates that somehow CNN cameras are always on hand for.

The Platte River Network employees tasked with wiping the server sent a work ticket email with the subject line stating, “Hillary cover-up operation work ticket archive cleanup.” For some reason that didn’t raise any red flags for any FBI agent assigned the case. When have you ever seen federal investigators with an almost limitless mandate to be so incurious?

We learned after the fact that former FBI Director James Comey had drafted his letter “exonerating” Clinton, before his agents had even interviewed her. Yet Comey would present his findings to the nation, where he cited 110 emails considered classified at the time they were sent, and an additional 2,000 that were retroactively classified.

Clinton nor anyone who worked for her was faulted for their actions by Comey, who yet still said, “any reasonable person in Secretary Clinton’s position, or in the position of those government employees with whom she was corresponding … should have known that an unclassified system was no place for that conversation.”

How can anyone look at the handling of these very prominent cases and call them an even application of justice?

Whatever the purpose of the Mar-a-Lago raid, unless Garland actually drops an indictment, all it will accomplish is bulwarking Trump’s power within the GOP by invigorating his supporters and the GOP base around him rather than more palatable challengers like Florida Gov. Ron Desantis.

Despite four years of inspector generals and special prosecutors running amok under Trump, now that Joe Biden is president they are no longer required, despite all evidence to the contrary. Simply pointing to the aegis of an office are no longer enough to justify such blatant political actions. Garland needs to legitimize the raid, or he risks hurling our republic into the abyss. Unless that’s what he and the White House want.

While the media chums the water speculating and crafting pet theories for Trump’s demise, this last week has brought twin stories laying bare the lengths to which the FBI and Intelligence Agencies went to protect Joe Biden’s candidacy.

Whistleblowers within the FBI have brought forward yet more accusations that great efforts were taken to dissuade investigators from pursuing the Hunter Biden laptop during the 2020 election. They allege that they were told by their superiors that the FBI didn’t want to influence the outcome of another election, an admission that probably requires a column all its own to unpack completely.

To add even more fuel to the fire, Meta and Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg paid his way onto the Joe Rogan Experience earlier this week, and spilled the beans that his platforms were directed to censor and constrain any attempts to share memes or links to the New York Post’s stories breaking the Hunter Biden Laptop story.

I’ll boil it down to this: If the bureaucrats of the FBI believe that 2016’s outcome was unduly influenced by Servergate, and correctly assumed that the 2020 candidacy of Joe would have been derailed by a proper investigation into Hunter’s laptop, couldn’t they make the same rationalization about any candidate in any election going forward? Why does their concern begin and end with affecting Biden’s candidacy, and not Trump’s, who is also the presumed frontrunner of his party?

Given everything that we know the FBI has done and undone in the last six years alone, the answers to these questions are already pretty evident.