Homeland Security calls the case Omar's own lawyers call unlawful 'strong.'

…(cont) Now, you'd figure a raid like that starts and ends with the one piece of paper. It didn't. Two days later, the 14th, they'd taken her phone, and they'd sent out — I want to say more than a dozen — grand jury subpoenas, some of them to her own relatives. I don't have anybody in Congress. If I did, I don't know what I'd tell my brother-in-law when that showed up at his door.

And somewhere in there — hold on, I had this written down, here it is — somewhere in there, before any judge signed a warrant, agents went through her trash. Pulled DNA off what she'd thrown out. Before the warrant. I keep coming back to that part, not because I don't believe it — I believe it, it's right here on the page — I'm just not clear anymore on what order things are supposed to happen in. I always figured the warrant came first and the trash came after. Maybe that's just me and how I was raised.

Her own lawyers put it in writing this week — Friday, the Associated Press had the letter — that the whole search was, in their words, "neither justified nor lawful." That's not the other side talking. That's her own people, asking the Justice Department, politely, to give back what they took.

And the government's word for all of it — I saw this in black and white, Homeland Security's own word for the case they built out of her garbage before the warrant ever showed up — was "strong." Strong. I wrote that one down too, underlined it twice, because I wanted to be sure I had it right. Strong.

I was going to leave it there. I really was.

Except — and I apologize, I know you've got somewhere to be — the House Majority Whip, a man named Emmer, said this week that if it all holds up, she ought to go to jail. Deported too. Over the form. The one her father filled out when she was a child, built on the trash they pulled before the warrant, that her own lawyers call unlawful.

That the government, in writing, calls strong.