That Hillary Clinton remains in the running for president is the most concrete affirmation of our descent into lawlessness. Not only did the FBI grant immunity to certain key witnesses in the Clinton email scandal, those same witnesses promptly returned the favor by asserting their Fifth Amendment right not to testify before Congress and, in one case, by utterly ignoring a congressional subpoena. In addition, the Bureau agreed to destroy the laptops of former Clinton chief of staff Cheryl Mills and ex-campaign staffer Heather Samuelson.

Just as revealing, the FBI agents limited their search to documents authored before January 2015, relinquishing “any opportunity to find evidence related to the destruction of evidence or obstruction of justice related to Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized use of a private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State,” stated a letter sent to Attorney General Loretta Lynch by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-VA).

Amazingly, it gets worse. This side deal was made even though the laptops could have been obtained via a subpoena with no conditions attached. And when classified government documents are found on a computer, that computer legally becomes government property.

Furthermore, Mills — despite being the subject of a criminal investigation, and despite having been caught in a bald-faced lie about when she became aware of Clinton’s private email server — was allowed to participate as one of Clinton’s lawyers, with the concomitant assertion of attorney-client privilege, during Clinton’s unrecorded holiday weekend “interview” with the FBI. “This unheard-of accommodation was made in violation not only of rudimentary investigative protocols and attorney-ethics rules, but also of the federal criminal law,” explains former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy.

In other news, Barack Obama’s White House coordinated with Clinton’s pre-campaign in early 2015 on how to handle her budding email scandal. We can only assume that “coordination” extended through undetectable channels to the Justice Department.

And as The Wall Street Journal sums up, “[T]he FBI and Justice gave Mrs. Clinton and her entourage special political treatment. No grand jury that the public knows about. Immunity. Special side deals. No hard digging into contradictory testimony. An FBI interview only at the last minute. Public exoneration by the FBI director when that isn’t his job. FBI summaries released on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day. No wonder millions of Americans think the system is rigged.”

(Excerpted from Arnold Ahlert’s Analysis on our Banana Republic, and updated.)