We don't need a news conference by the Justice Department about an investigation while in the middle of that investigation.
An official probe into a potential crime is not a matter needing a halftime score--even if, or especially if, the subject is a former president.
We don't need the White House commenting either, because a criminal investigation of a president's predecessor absolutely should be none of a president's business. This White House's closed mouth has been laudable, even as it has been attacked for that appropriateness by people incapable of closed mouths.
And we don't need Republican officeholders and demagogues, but I largely repeat myself, demanding in faux outrage that the Justice Department make a full public explanation of why it would dare raid the home of a former president.
These Republicans say potentially violent supporters of that former president are riled up on social media and may pose a threat, and might stand down if assured by the Justice Department of ... what, exactly?
Arrest the thugs if they commit crimes. Investigate any threats they've put on social media. Don't coddle them by saying they get to direct what the federal Justice Department does.
The nation is dangerously divided, these Republicans say, and needs information. But the division exists mostly because of the human atrocity who fomented an insurrection and watched it on television for his personal entertainment and gratification.
Then he blabbered publicly about this raid while the Justice Department kept its mouth shut.
We know enough at this juncture: Donald Trump left the White House in an infantile huff carrying material the government said was classified; under duress, he returned several boxes; what he returned did not contain materials having to do with nuclear weapons programs that must be kept under government wraps, and FBI agents showed up at Trump's home and took more documents pursuant to a warrant that the Justice Department convinced a judge to sign on the basis that the petitioners had made a case that the search was warranted.
Trump's lawyer was alerted to the raid, received a copy of the warrant and was on site when the search was executed.
But because Trump was motor-mouthing publicly about the horror done to him, and because his extremist allies were spreading lies and rumors, a circumspect attorney general, Merrick Garland, came out late Thursday afternoon and said the Justice Department would ask the court to unseal the search warrant.
That wasn't a Justice Department comment on a pending investigation. It was calling Trump's typical bluff.
It's a simple rule of government investigation: You don't talk about it while it's ongoing. It could be unfair to a subject of interest or it could befoul the investigation itself.
All of this will come out, just as it came out that the Mueller investigation was pages of pulled punches.
If this Justice Department raided a former president's personal home to take information to which it wasn't entitled on bogus justification provided by a false affidavit presented to a clueless or corrupt judge, then that will come out and Trump will crow in victory again.
As Kenneth Starr always said with such smarmy sanctimony as he probed presidential semen, his independent counsel's work would proceed where the evidence led and the evidence would lead to an eventual accounting in the form of a report.
Starr owed us no mid-investigative news conference showing a blue dress and saying "lookie here" while pointing to a soiling.
We all eventually got that promised report, and it was adjudged pornographic and unpersuasive. Bill Clinton's approval ratings went up.
I'd invoke a bigger picture--a separation of politics and law enforcement.
I'm on record in late 2020 asserting that Joe Biden ought to delegate the selection of an attorney general to an independent group and vow no White House involvement in that selection or in the operation of the Justice Department.
I heard from astonished Democrats who said I didn't understand politics if I thought the new Democratic president ought to cede the Justice appointment. But I did understand politics in the contemporary context of the mire into which Trump had plunged it.
He saw the Justice Department as his personal law firm. Biden could have acted to heal that wound.
Whether to charge a person with a federal crime ought to be an entirely statutory determination based on professional criminal investigation signed off on by an ultimately decisive and responsible official, neither a Republican nominee nor Democratic nominee.
But that's not going to happen.
If the raid of Trump's home comes to nothing, then he becomes more likely to be president again, at which time Rudy Giuliani or Sidney Powell can oversee "justice" in America, assuming Giuliani gets his law license back.
Then we'd probably have plenty of Justice Department news conferences. Less justice, no doubt, but more blabbering.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.