Think the fog of partisan Trump investigations will lift once the President leaves office, either in 2021 or 2025? Not if Elizabeth Warren has anything to say about it. With the Iowa caucuses approaching and her campaign fortunes flagging, Senator Warren now says that as President she’d launch an open-ended criminal investigation into her predecessor and anyone who worked for him.

Ms. Warren’s latest “anti-corruption” plan says she would create “a Justice Department Task Force to investigate corruption during the Trump administration and to hold government officials accountable for illegal activity.” She would order Justice to look for violations of “federal bribery laws, insider trading laws, and other anti-corruption and public integrity laws” as well as immigration-enforcement offenses.

“This will be no ordinary transition between administrations,” the document says ominously. Team Warren won’t be satisfied with taking control of the executive branch in an election. They also want scalps of choice ex-officials. The plan links to news articles about Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, White House Adviser KellyanneCon way and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson.

If there is evidence of a crime by a former Administration official, it should be investigated through the normal channels. Ms. Warren is proposing something different: A law-enforcement task force dedicated to searching for wrongdoing only by political opponents. This would be familiar in Latin American dictatorships where the party that loses an election may be jailed as retribution.

Pundits said Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign threat to investigate Hillary Clinton for her email mismanagement was a chilling breach of democratic norms. We opposed such an investigation but at least the alleged misconduct was limited to specific conduct by one official, whereas Ms. Warren wants investigations of all Republican officials for any political offenses.

Despite all the apocalyptic think-pieces and high-minded books, America has not become an “autocracy” three years into Donald Trump’s Presidency. The opposition party won the House in the midterms, proceeded to impeach the President, and its leading candidates are ahead in the head-to-head 2020 presidential election polls.

Yet in polarized times the temptation to criminalize political differences is stronger than ever. It will be especially strong for Democrats once they are back in control of the Justice Department. Down Senator Warren’s road lies a real threat to liberty.

A rally against gun-control measures in Richmond, Va., Jan. 20. PHOTO: MIGUEL JUAREZ LUGO/ZUMA PRESS

Middletown, Va.

Troy Carter, 49, says that, other than voting, he’d never been involved in politics. That changed late last year, when he heard that a county board of supervisors in Virginia voted to become a gun sanctuary. On Monday he was one of an estimated 22,000 people who gathered peacefully at the Capitol Square in Richmond, Va., to support gun rights. Many of those attending were visibly armed.

In the modern era, it is difficult to come up with an administration that has spent as much energy trying to sabotage its successor in office. Obama administration officials have worked tirelessly to embed themselves into media outlets as supposedly objective voices.

After President Donald Trump oversaw the killing of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani and as missiles fell from the night sky into Iraq from Iran, those voices took to the airwaves to push the Obama line against Trump. In the American media, with help from former Obama staffers, Trump was the bad guy and Iran was the good guy. Iran deescalated tensions. Trump made things worse.

On CNN, Jim Sciutto of the Obama administration sat as an objective news anchor. CNN also now has Valerie Jarrett’s daughter, Laura, in an anchor chair, too. They tossed a co-anchor for their early morning news show to make room for the daughter of one of Barack Obama’s most ardent defenders. But we are supposed to pretend there is no bias.

They have been joined by a bevy of other Obama surrogates who now pretend to be objective analysts. Watching James Clapper, also of the Obama administration, pretend to be an unbiased national security analyst for CNN makes me long for the days of “Baghdad Bob,” Saddam Hussein’s spokesman who claimed the Americans had been defeated as American tanks rolled into Baghdad.

Newsweek reported last week that, “James Clapper, the former director of National Intelligence, has urged Americans to be skeptical of President Donald Trump’s justification for the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.” Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that CIA Director Gina Haspel, whose nomination Clapper supported, “had advised Mr. Trump that the threat the Iranian general presented was greater than the threat of Iran’s response if he was killed, according to current and former American officials. Indeed, Haspel had predicted the most likely response would be a missile strike from Iran to bases where American troops were deployed, the very situation that appeared to be playing out on Tuesday afternoon.”

Who do we believe? The CIA director or the people ideologically dedicated to protecting Obama’s precious Iran deal? When watching the Obama team — whether they are anchoring CNN coverage or mouthing off on MSNBC — it is striking just how invested they are in denying reality.

After Iran launched its functionally impotent attack against American positions in Iraq, Trump rightly pointed out the Obama administration helped Iran launch those missiles. The pushback from media fact checkers and Obama surrogates was fast and furious — and also more dedicated to protecting Obama than the truth.

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