Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas is generally known to national audiences as the Democratic leader who spearheaded a redistricting effort in the commonwealth, which voters endorsed and may help her party keep pace with Republicans’ gerrymandering arms race.
But two weeks after the statewide vote, Lucas is poised to be known for something very different, although possibly related. Politico reported:
The FBI searched the office of Democratic Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas on Wednesday morning, according to multiple media reports and news footage in front of her Portsmouth office.
The FBI confirmed it was “executing a court-authorized federal search warrant in Portsmouth,” but did not explicitly state a target of its probe or what it was investigating.
A related report from The Associated Press added that the FBI’s search was part of a corruption investigation, though these details have not been independently verified by MS NOW and neither Lucas nor the FBI have commented.
The AP’s report added, “Though the exact nature of the investigation was unclear, the search comes as the FBI and Justice Department have opened a spate of politically charged investigations into perceived adversaries of President Donald Trump.”
It’s that second part of the sentence that stands out.
I have not seen or heard a word about any of the evidence against Lucas, if such evidence exists. It is entirely possible that investigators have worked in good faith as part of a responsible law enforcement operation, and there’s no reason to question the legitimacy of the probe or the motivations of those behind it.
But while I don’t know whether the case against Lucas has merit, I do know that the hyperpartisan leaders of the Justice Department and the FBI have made it impossible to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Not to put too fine a point on this, but this is why we don’t politicize federal law enforcement. Because even if the underlying case is legitimate, it’s impossible to avoid the larger context and the degree to which this looks like a retaliatory investigation against a Democrat, launched by a weaponized department known for its retaliatory investigations against Democrats.
In other words, the DOJ and the FBI have, over the last 16 months, set their collective credibility on fire, corrupting federal law enforcement to a degree unseen in generations. There have simply been too many abuses, launched too often, against too many Trump targets.
The result is a dynamic that makes it impossible to have confidence in the institutions’ judgment and decisions.
What’s more, the fact that Fox News, an outlet aligned with Republican politics, apparently received a heads-up about the operation in Portsmouth and was able to air live footage of the FBI search, further reinforces concerns that this case is inherently political.
Shortly after FBI officials executed the search warrant on Wednesday morning, Virginia House of Delegates Speaker Don Scott issued a written statement that read in part, “Given the politicization of this administration — an FBI led by Kash Patel and a Justice Department run by President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney — I think people should take this with a grain of salt and allow the facts to come out before jumping to conclusions.”
Scott’s statement continued, “At this point we simply do not know what this ultimately means. Right now, there is far more theatrics and speculation than actual information available to the public. It also raises important questions. How was Fox News, a national media outlet, first on the scene? Did they know about the raid beforehand? If so, who approved that? And what more information is there about what this raid was actually about? Virginians deserve answers before anyone rushes to political conclusions.”
Watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”
