Justice Department promises midterms will have 'no interruption,' delivers one to a congresswoman's front door instead.

…(cont) On September 18th, border czar Tom Homan told Fox News there was an ongoing criminal investigation into Representative Ilhan Omar. Same piece, same day, Omar said nobody from the federal government had been in touch with her about any such thing. A confirmed investigation nobody had confirmed to the person it was about. Is that how a criminal matter usually opens, with the subject finding out from cable news before the mail finds her?

Then on October 12th, the department explained itself. Agents searched Omar's home, over immigration paperwork her father filled out when she was a child, the kind of form that eventually got her the citizenship she received in 2000. Three days later, on the 15th, reporting said the investigation wasn't really about the paperwork at all. It was aimed at taking that citizenship back. Does a records question usually end with agents searching someone's house?

Obama didn't think so either. He called it "appalling" on the 19th, called the whole posture "transparent" — his word — an effort to intimidate an elected official for criticizing the president. The day before that, he'd written something I keep underlining: there's no reason to believe it will stop with her. I don't know what he meant by that. I only know what the department did the same week, which was more of the same thing, aimed somewhere else entirely.

Because that same week, the department wasn't only at a congresswoman's house. On the 15th it sued the state of California, asking a judge to block the counting of more than twenty thousand mail ballots it says might belong to noncitizens. That's the lawsuit behind the thumb drive — the department had given the state forty-eight hours to set those ballots aside first. California didn't. A month earlier, in September, a whistleblower said the department's own people had been told to pose as voters while they searched state rolls for names on lists just like that one, which, the whistleblower said, might not even be legal under state law.

So here's my word, and I've been saving it. On Sunday, CBS quoted the department, about the midterms, about the very ballots it's suing over: "there should be no interruption" with the results. I wrote that down because I liked the sentence. I worked a toll plaza on weekends for six years, extra money, and I can tell you the whole design of the thing is a promise — ticket out, card ready, arm up before you reach it, nothing stopping your morning. It only works if the arm goes up the same way for every car. It doesn't have to. Sometimes it comes down for one car, and the cars behind just assume there was a reason, and they drive on.

There's just one more thing, and it's the part I can't put down. The department already used that word once, for the ballots. So where was that promise on the morning agents stood at Representative Omar's front door? I have it written right here, under October 12th, one word, circled: interruption.