Biden special counsel’s 'runaway train’ scooped up sensitive lawmaker info: 'Abuse of power'

Forty-four members of Congress had their texts scooped up by a special counsel's team that decided its own filter review process was optional. That's not a rounding error. That's investigators deciding the safeguards built to protect legislative communications didn't apply to them, and doing it quietly enough that senators are only now finding out what got swept up in the net.

Call it whatever euphemism you want, but "runaway train" is a phrase that came from people who've seen how these investigations are supposed to run. Filter protocols exist precisely so a probe aimed at one target doesn't turn into a fishing expedition through the phones of lawmakers who have nothing to do with the case. Skipping that step isn't an oversight, it's a choice. Someone decided speed or convenience mattered more than the boundaries that were supposedly non-negotiable.

Remember how this same apparatus was pitched to the country: rigorous, careful, above reproach, the opposite of politically motivated overreach. That sales pitch is hard to square with a team that apparently couldn't be bothered to run its own review before hoovering up communications belonging to sitting members of Congress. If this had happened to a probe investigating a Democrat, the outrage machine would already be running at full volume.

Congress has every right to demand a full accounting here, not a quiet memo buried in a footnote. If the rules only bind investigators when it's politically convenient, they aren't rules. They're theater, and voters deserve better than theater dressed up as accountability.