Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats can’t seem to decide whether or not they want Donald Trump to run for president. But either way, they’re committed to turning our nation into a banana republic with their political persecution of the man whose appeal drives them crazy and whose commitment to draining The Swamp frightens them to their core. As Fox News reports:

The FBI’s decision to execute a search warrant at former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home on Monday is “unprecedented” — especially for a non-sitting commander-in-chief and one who has indicated he might run again, a former special-agent-in-charge told Fox News Digital on Monday.

“We just haven’t investigated presidents after they’ve served their term,” Michael Tabman, former head of the FBI’s Minneapolis Field Office, said. “But it is a huge move by the FBI in that the political sensitivities are clear. It’s obvious that they’re dealing on a very, sort of tenuous political climate when you go out and you investigate a president, especially one who says he may run for office again.”

Trump announced on Monday that his palatial Florida residence had been raided early in the morning. Sources told Fox News Digital the search was in connection with materials that Trump took with him from his time as president. Sources also said National Archives and Records Administration referred the case to the Justice Department, which recovered 15 boxes of classified materials from the home.

“The raid of [Mar-a-Lago] is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves,” tweeted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.”

The governor is spot-on. We used to roll our eyes and shake our heads at the corrupt political machinations going on in all those small, sorry Central American countries. Who’s laughing now?

“A raid is supposed to be a last resort,” said constitutional law expert Alan Dershowitz, a Democrat. “But this administration has used the weaponization of the justice system against its political enemies. It’s arrested people, denied them bail, put them in handcuffs — used all kinds of techniques that are not usually applied to American citizens.”

Indeed, Dershowitz seemed stunned by the use of an FBI raid, calling the proper step for retrieving the documents in question a subpoena. He noted that a raid should be used to obtain evidence that’s under immediate threat of being destroyed. And with Donald Trump in Manhattan instead of at his Florida home, it’s unclear who might’ve been poised to destroy those documents.

Or, as columnist Byron York incredulously tweeted, “They raided his house over the Presidential Records Act?”

Heck, not even the legal analyst at Trump-deranged CNN thinks the raid was justified.

We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, this is the same FBI that falsified evidence to the FISA Court in order to obtain a warrant to spy on Trump associate Carter Page and thereby spy on Donald Trump and his entire team. The same FBI that helped concoct that whole “Russia collusion” hoax. So if you’re thinking the FBI deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to decency and credibility and integrity, well, think again. It goes without saying that there are many thousands of good people among the bureau’s 35,000 employees, but its 7th-floor leadership and a well-placed network of obedient order-takers are destroying the hard-earned reputation of what was once the world’s premier law-enforcement organization.

No, this ain’t your daddy’s FBI. Much as it pains us to say it, this is Joe Biden’s FBI, his Praetorian Guard. This is a nakedly corrupt FBI that has finally been exposed by more than a dozen whistleblowers, an FBI led by a gutless bureaucrat who last week skipped out on a serious grilling from Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans so he could board the FBI’s private Gulfstream 550 jet to vacation at his summer home in the Adirondacks.

Ultimately, and most troubling of all, this is an FBI that treats those on the Right differently than it treats those on the Left.

How so? “Christopher Wray has ironclad video evidence that Hunter Biden broke multiple federal gun laws, multiple federal narcotics laws, and multiple federal sex trafficking laws,” tweeted political commentator John Cardillo, “and still hasn’t served a search warrant on any of his homes or offices.”

True enough. And that assessment doesn’t even factor in Junior’s influence peddling with woefully corrupt Ukraine and the Communist Chinese while his dad, the “Big Guy,” was serving as our nation’s vice president.

It’s also the FBI that, just before the 2020 election, entrapped a bunch of knuckleheads with more than a dozen agents and informants in an unserious plot to kidnap Michigan Democrat Governor Gretchen Whitmer. To the FBI’s eternal shame, that case ultimately collapsed and was all but laughed out of court.

Or, to cite yet another example, as Donald Trump himself put it: “Hillary Clinton was allowed to delete and acid wash 33,000 emails AFTER they were subpoenaed by Congress. Absolutely nothing has happened to hold her accountable.”

We suppose it’s altogether fitting, then, that the Biden DOJ scraped the bottom of the barrel to find a judge who’d sign off on this warrant. That judge, Bruce Reinhart, once left his job with the U.S. attorney’s office in South Florida in mid-prosecution of the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking case. Why did he quit? To go into private practice as a defense attorney — and to immediately begin defending the same Epstein bunch he’d been prosecuting a day earlier.

Clearly, desperate times call for desperate measures.

Is all this an effort to disqualify Trump from running in 2024? It sure seems like it. And a well-placed lefty lawyer might’ve let that cat out of the bag. Tweeted Harry Litman: “Per Marc Elias HUGE POINT: the records provision they’re investigating carries the penalty that someone convicted ‘shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.’ So this could be the whole enchilada in terms of DOJ resolution.”

Regardless of the Democrats’ intent, though, they’ll have some ‘splaining to do come January. If, as is expected, Republicans retake control of the House of Representatives, they’ll regain the gavels, regain investigative and subpoena power, and regain control of the congressional purse. As our likely next House Speaker Kevin McCarthy declared: “I’ve seen enough. The Department of Justice has reached an intolerable state of weaponized politicization. When Republicans take back the House, we will conduct immediate oversight of this department, follow the facts, and leave no stone unturned. Attorney General Garland, preserve your documents and clear your calendar.”

Updated to include additional legal analysis.