The federal search of Representative Ilhan Omar’s Washington home Monday morning has placed one of Donald Trump’s fiercest opponents inside a political hall of mirrors, where almost anything she says in her defense risks sounding like something the president has been saying for years. Ladies and gentlemen, ’tis Trump’s funhouse mirror, where the faces change and the accusations reverse direction, but the political script remains intact. For years, Trump has portrayed criminal investigations of his conduct as political persecution, asking Americans to see prosecutors as partisans and courtrooms as instruments of power.
A political television show with villains and heroes, playing out in real time across American institutions. Now Omar, a progressive Democrat whose antagonism with the president is well established, faces an exquisite political dilemma. Well, exquisite for us consumers of this brand of politics, at least.
If she denounces the investigation as a politically motivated persecution, she risks becoming an unlikely echo of Trump himself, adopting the very language he used to discredit the criminal cases against him. Trump could hardly ask for a more convenient illustration of his argument: apparently, investigations become political witch hunts when the other side is being investigated. That line of behavior, arguing that the institutions conducting the investigation have been politically compromised, will also force her to explain why Americans should trust those same institutions when they investigate Trump.
An alternative position also presents its own difficulty. If Omar welcomes the investigation as a legitimate exercise of federal authority, she risks lending credibility to a process whose independence she may have good reason to question, particularly given the president's history of publicly targeting her. The political irony carries a problem for both sides: if every investigation of a politician can be dismissed as persecution, how is the public supposed to distinguish a genuine abuse of power from a genuine crime?
And, perhaps more uncomfortably for Omar, how does one defend the integrity of the justice system while questioning its integrity when the agents arrive at one's own front door? Let's first state the obvious: questioning the motives behind an investigation and rejecting the legitimacy of the justice system itself are two very different things. On that note, Omar can demand evidence of prosecutorial independence without surrendering her belief in the rule of law.
Trump, likewise, was entitled to challenge the fairness of the proceedings against him. And there is a perfectly legitimate case for investigating Omar if federal authorities have credible evidence of wrongdoing. A search warrant approved by a judge carries legal weight, however politically charged the circumstances surrounding it.
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