Yesterday I wrote a post basically arguing for a broad resistance to allowing the avalanche of corrupt and criminal conduct under the second Trump administration to take on the color of normality and acceptability. The answer to that is broad criminal accountability. The post was entitled, “The Law is Coming.” This was partly a reference to a phrase I used frequently during the first Trump administration, after which the cause of accountability was at best uneven and ultimately a failure, a story we all know well and from bitter experience.

I’m hoping to bring you some news on the DOJ-in-Exile front in the not-too-distant future. It was probably simply too early in the spring and summer of 2025. It’s not too early now. But the DOJ-in-Exile idea was and is part of a more general ambition and agenda — to create a baseline record, a predicate and an expectation of future accountability for the Trump administration’s criminal conduct. Some of that effort is a kind of opposition therapy, resisting the authoritarian aim of convincing the public that the law, the ecosystem of criminal accountability has disappeared. It heartens people. It provides a framework of expectation: the law hasn’t disappeared. We’re in an interregnum. It will return, as will accountability. The battle over expectations about the future is a central battle in any authoritarian takeover.

But it’s not solely a matter of heartening, strengthening the morale of the opposition. It is also very directly and literally laying the groundwork for criminal accountability for a renegade executive and all the corrupt actors and criminals who now populate the executive branch.

And there you have it. As the White House licks its wounds after Virginia’s successful move to redistrict its House map and net Democrats as many as four new seats, the leader of that effort (and most high-profile advocate) has her office raided by the FBI in some hitherto unknown federal investigation. The fact that the Feds tipped Fox News to the raid on state Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas’s office probably tells us all we need to know about this FBI action.