Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) is the one who’s led the charge on malfeasance issues at the Secret Service, and here’s what the agency’s response has been: About 45 Secret Service agents violated privacy laws when they accessed Chaffetz’s decade-old rejected application for a job with the agency. According to a government report examined by ABC News, the service opened up the file 18 minutes into the March hearing in which Chaffetz grilled the organization over the incident where two drunk Secret Service agents drove through an active bomb investigation and bumped into a White House barrier. Later, the service leaked the document to The Daily Beast in an effort to discredit the lawmaker.

There’s no doubt reform is needed because this is the agency of the Colombian prostitution scandal, the agency that bungled a 2011 investigation of shots fired at the White House, and the one that let a man armed with a knife into the building. But everybody from the service director’s chief of staff to key positions down the line saw Chaffetz’s application. Using government to shut down a politician is astounding corruption. Recall that Richard Nixon created the “Political Enemies Project,” a list of people Nixon disliked and wanted to hurt by siccing the government upon them. As Hot Air’s Allahpundit writes, “The theory they wanted the public to believe, I guess, is that Chaffetz harbored some sort of grudge against the agency for not hiring him many years before, as if a powerful congressman couldn’t quite get over his disappointment of more than a decade earlier. They’re even incompetent in smearing people.”