They should have listened to me though I did not know what I was talking about. I am more proud than embarrassed—though I am some of both in recalling that.

I wrote in early 2021 that we needed to find a way, as a principled matter of fairness and justice and the credibility of American authority, to separate politics and law enforcement. It was as noble as separating church and state.

I wrote that as unsolicited advice to the president-elect at the time, Joe Biden, who would surely never see it, coming as it did from a small-time bumpkin in Arkansas. I knew it would be met, if at all, with disregard or ridicule, mainly on the dreaded accusation of naivete.

Naivete, it turns out, might be the quality most needed during the degenerative disease of resentment and polarization afflicting our once-great country.

The advice was that Biden remove himself from personally exercising his legal duty to nominate the attorney general. I acknowledged he’d have to make the nomination nominally and take responsibility for it. But I thought it best, under the circumstances, that he stay out of it, standing aside for some kind of objective nonpartisan process that I had not the first idea how to set up.

The fact is that federal law enforcement has long existed as a purely partisan political function. We may as well run it out of the Republican National Committee or Democratic National Committee, so fundamental is partisan political control not only to the police power of the Justice........

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