Democrats were for whistleblowers before they were against them.

Trump-hating deep state toadies like Alexander Vindman and Eric Ciaramella were hailed as patriotic truth-tellers when the target was the Bad Orange Man, but now that a group of FBI whistleblowers has courageously stepped forward to talk about the rank politicization within the once-proud law enforcement agency, well, it’s time to question their loyalty to their country.

We say it often, but it still bears repeating: If it weren’t for double standards, Democrats wouldn’t have any standards.

This truism was on display yesterday during a House Judiciary Select Subcommittee hearing on the Weaponization of the Federal Government. There, a handful of intrepid whistleblowers came forward to expose what they believe to be a pattern of pro-Democrat, anti-Republican politicization within the FBI.

As if the FBI’s self-proclaimed “fidelity” and “integrity” hadn’t already taken a big enough hit this week.

“Mr. Chairman,” whined Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz to committee chairman Jim Jordan, “these individuals have been determined not to be whistleblowers. These are not whistleblowers. They have been determined by the agency not to be whistleblowers. Are you deciding that they’re whistleblowers?”

Of course they’re whistleblowers, even if federal bureaucrats might not want to grant them whistleblower protections. We wonder: What’s Wasserman-Schultz afraid of?

After Jordan offered opening remarks about the FBI’s targeting of peaceful pro-life activists, school parents, and practicing Catholics, Democrat ranking member Stacey Plaskett switched gears to rail about MAGA Republicans, saying that the committee was “going after the FBI on Donald Trump’s behalf.” She went on: “This is not a committee on the weaponization of government. This is a committee for the weaponization of government. This select committee is clearly focused on undermining law enforcement so extremists can undermine our elections through corruption and control our government through threats of political violence.”

Here, we’re reminded of the fundamental truism about Democrat projection: They tend to accuse their political opponents of precisely that which they themselves are guilty of doing.

If you have three and a half hours to spare, knock yourself out. Otherwise, we’ll try to hit a couple of highlights — and lowlights — for you.

The written testimonies of the three whistleblowing witnesses, and one of the lawyers representing them, are well worth reviewing, if only to reveal the Stalinist tactics the bureau employs against those within its ranks who dare to speak out:

• Testimony of Garret O'Boyle, Whistleblower; FBI Special Agent

• Testimony of Steve Friend, Whistleblower; former FBI Special Agent

• Testimony of Marcus Allen, Whistleblower; FBI Staff Operations Specialist

• Testimony of Tristan Leavitt, President, Empower Oversight; former Member of the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board

“This has been a trying circumstance for me and my family,” said Allen, a retired Marine, Iraq War veteran, and the 2019 FBI employee of the year in its Charlotte Field office. “It has been more than a year since the FBI took my paycheck from me. My family and I have been surviving on early withdrawals from our retirement accounts while the FBI has ignored my request for approval to obtain outside employment during the review of my security clearance. We have lost our federal health insurance coverage. There is apparently no end in sight.”

What was the reason for all this? What had Allen done to deserve the retributive wrath of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency? Here’s how he tells it:

Despite my history of unblemished service to the United States, the FBI suspended my security clearance, accusing me of actually being DISLOYAL to my country. This outrageous and insulting accusation is based on unsubstantiated accusations that I hold “conspiratorial views” regarding the events of January 6, 2021, and that I allegedly sympathize with criminal conduct. I do not. I was not in Washington DC on January 6, [but] played no part in the events of January 6, and I condemn all criminal activity that occurred. Instead, it appears that I was retaliated against because I forwarded information to my superiors and others that questioned the official narrative of the events of January 6. As a result, I was accused of promoting “conspiratorial views” and “unreliable information.” Because I did this, the FBI questioned my allegiance to the United States.

California Democrat Linda Sanchez was apparently unmoved by Allen’s story, by the awful plight of his family, and by the ruthlessness of the bureau in retaliating against those with the guts to question its objectivity and political impartiality. Indeed, Sanchez’s opening screed was emblematic of her party’s goal, which was to fixate on Donald Trump and the events of January 6, 2021, rather than the substance of the whistleblowers’ sworn testimony about the politicization of the FBI:

On January 6, a mob of people who believed Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen, stormed the Capitol, seeking to stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election. They erected a gallows on the lawn just outside this room, and they ran through the halls looking to find and hang the vice president of the United States. It was a shocking moment of political violence, and many of us on this dais, including myself, were there that day. We all felt the fear of knowing that there were people roaming the Capitol, looking to kill us. But clearly, some of us have quickly forgotten that. I’ve heard my colleagues on the other side of the aisle suggest that, quote, the FBI was participating in the insurrection.

And on and on it went.

Perhaps Sanchez has forgotten that the only person killed on January 6 was a five-foot-two-inch, 110-pound, 35-year-old Air Force veteran named Ashli Babbitt, who was, by any reasonable assessment, unjustifiably shot and killed by a Capitol Police officer named Michael Byrd.

And her story about that gallows out there on the Capitol lawn is a rich and fascinating one, given that the FBI and the DOJ and the Capitol Police — with all 14,000 hours of that video footage at their disposal — somehow can’t seem to produce even a moment of it showing the gallows being transported and erected out there in the open, in one of the most secure and heavily surveilled areas of one of the most secure and heavily surveilled cities in the nation.

Incidentally, in addition to these mysterious hangmen and their construction crew, the FBI has been unable to identify the suspect who somehow planted those unexploded pipe bombs at the nearby DNC and RNC offices just prior to the riot — again, in one of the most heavily surveilled spots in the nation.

Why, if we didn’t know better, we’d think maybe the bureau isn’t telling us everything it knows about these, ahem, mysterious incidents.

And why might we think such things? Because one of Allen’s fellow whistleblowers, George Hill, from the FBI’s Boston field office, testified that agents in the bureau’s DC office refused to share hours of the January 6 video footage “because there may be undercover officers or confidential human sources in the videos whose identities would need to be protected.”

Wow. Could it be that agents within the FBI were actually working surreptitiously to make the J6 riot worse, rather than working to stop it cold? For a bureau that worked so hard to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016, it’s not out of the question.

Thanks to a handful of courageous FBI whistleblowers, we might one day get some answers to these and other questions about the bureau’s rank pro-Democrat, anti-Republican politicization.