Where were they when...

Byron York writes in part in the Washington Examiner,

...But now, as Barr looks into how it all started, some voices that were part of that frenzy are changing their tune about the value of investigations. They now express concern about investigations, concern that Barr is politicizing the Justice Department to go after perceived political enemies.

"The power to investigate is the power to destroy," a former U.S. attorney, Gregory Brower, told the Washington Post recently. "The ability to simply point to a pending investigation against a person can have devastating effects on that person and can have a potential political benefit to the person orchestrating the investigation."

"President Trump appears to be now using [his] power, with an assist from the Justice Department, to exact revenge on some perceived political enemies," said NBC's Chuck Todd.

The president is "weaponizing the Department of Justice against perceived enemies," said CNN's Anderson Cooper.

Not to be too blunt about it, but where were these voices the last three years?

Where were they when the Steele dossier burst onto the scene in January 2017, with its extremely damaging and unsupported allegations, leaked to undermine the president right as he took office?

Where were they when the public learned that the FBI, using false information, wiretapped a low-level former Trump foreign policy adviser, Carter Page, giving it entree into some of the campaign's communications?

Where were they when the Justice Department cooked up the idea that Flynn had violated the Logan Act, the 1799 law under which no one has ever been convicted, as a reason to question Flynn? And where were they when officials bragged about going outside channels to grab a chat with a busy, distracted Flynn, and later used that as the basis for a false statement charge even though investigators did not believe Flynn actually lied?

...Former FBI No. 2 and current CNN commentator Andrew McCabe played a role in the excesses we now associate with the Trump-Russia investigation. Now, though, he is complaining about the Justice Department's internal investigation into whether he lied under oath to agents seeking the source of a high-level leak. The source was McCabe himself, but he denied it multiple times. The Justice Department, facing an uphill battle trying a case before a deeply anti-Trump District of Columbia jury, recently decided against charging McCabe. And now, McCabe is indignant about the treatment meted out to investigative targets.

...More complaints are sure to come as Barr, and Barr's appointees, investigate the questionable acts of the investigators. Yes, it will be painful for some. But the public deserves to know what happened.

Read more here.