For nearly a decade, we sat through the same smug lecture, delivered by the same smug people, on a loop. No one is above the law. No one is above the law. No one is above the law. They said it on MSNBC. They said it on CNN. They embroidered it on pillows. They put it in bio lines next to rainbow flags and Ukrainian sunflowers. They chanted it outside courthouses while Trump was getting arraigned for allegedly mishandling paper. And then on April 15, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard reportedly started drawing up criminal referrals for the Obama-era officials who cooked up the Russia collusion hoax — and suddenly, overnight, the exact same people decided that actually, maybe, some people should be a little bit above the law, just this once, as a treat.

And oh, the panic. Good Lord, the panic. Liberal Twitter — sorry, liberal X — spent the entire evening of April 15 doing what can only be described as a group stress-vomit. Blue-check journalists who two years ago were writing odes to Jack Smith’s courage were suddenly warning, with clenched-jaw sincerity, that ‘weaponizing the Justice Department against political opponents is a red line in a democracy.’ The irony was so thick you could spread it on toast. You almost had to admire it, if you didn’t remember that these were the same people who livetweeted Mar-a-Lago being raided like it was the Super Bowl.

Here’s what we know, per the reporting out of Twitchy and everyone else who’s been following the breadcrumbs. Gabbard, who now runs the entire intelligence community, has been quietly going through the declassified files — the ones we all knew existed but nobody in authority would touch — and she’s got a list. An actual list. Names, dates, signatures. The people who pushed the Steele dossier knowing it was garbage. The people who signed the FISA warrants knowing they were lies. The people who ran the 51-former-intel-officials laptop letter op knowing it was election interference dressed up in a cardigan. That list is now reportedly heading to the Justice Department with the words ‘criminal referral’ stamped on top, and every single person who ever appeared on a cable news chyron labeled ‘former senior intelligence official’ is suddenly very interested in what their lawyer is doing this week.

The names floating around are not small. We’re talking about the architects. The guys whose memoirs got ghost-written while they pretended to be tortured truth-tellers. The guys who got paid six figures a year to sit on CNN panels and furrow their brows about ‘norms.’ The guys who monetized ruining the country for eight straight years and expected to die of old age in a Georgetown townhouse with a Peabody on the mantle. And now their phones are blowing up at 11 p.m. on a Wednesday with calls from their attorneys saying, ‘Hey, so, don’t panic, but…’

And the meltdown on social media is not subtle. One particularly gifted pundit — the kind who spent 2023 explaining to us that indicting a former president was ‘just how the rule of law works, sweetie’ — was on there last night typing in all caps about how this sets ‘a terrifying precedent.’ A terrifying precedent. Sir. Ma’am. Comrade. You set the precedent. You threw the party, you served the drinks, you picked the music, and now that the same DJ is playing at somebody else’s house you’re calling the cops on the noise. Read the room.

The best part, honestly, is the sudden rediscovery of concepts these people spent a decade pretending didn’t exist. Things like prosecutorial discretion. Things like ‘selective prosecution.’ Things like ‘the chilling effect on public servants.’ For eight years the response to any conservative asking, ‘hey, is it maybe bad to jail your political opponents on process crimes?’ was a smirk and a ‘well, if they didn’t want to be investigated, they shouldn’t have broken the law.’ Now those same mouths are forming the words ‘banana republic’ and somehow managing to say it with a straight face. We’re not sure how. We’re genuinely impressed with the cardio.

Look, we’re not naive. We know how this goes. We’ve been promised accountability before. We sat through Durham. We sat through IG Horowitz. We sat through every two-year-delayed report that came out on a Friday afternoon and got one cycle of coverage before the media memory-holed it. We’ve been Charlie Brown with the football so many times we have grass stains on our permanent record. If Gabbard’s list ends up being another beautifully typed-up pile of ‘concerns were identified’ with no actual handcuffs attached, we’re going to be unhappy. We’ve earned the right to be unhappy.

But here’s what’s different this time, and here’s why the left is melting down instead of yawning. The referrals aren’t going to a Merrick Garland DOJ. They’re not going to some slow-walking career prosecutor who needs to think about his next book deal. They’re going into a Trump-run Justice Department with an attorney general who has shown exactly zero interest in playing the old Beltway game of ‘let’s just write a strongly-worded letter and go home.’ For the first time since 2016, the people who broke the rules to go after Trump are looking up and realizing the rules they broke are pointing back at them, and the cop at the other end of the radar gun is not their golfing buddy.

So yes, we’re going to enjoy this. We’ve earned that too. After ten years of being told to sit down, shut up, and accept the verdict of the ‘intelligence community’ that our own vote didn’t count, we’re allowed to pour ourselves a cold drink and watch the same intelligence community have a panic attack in public. It’s healthy. It’s therapeutic. It might even be, dare we say it, a little bit of justice.

No one is above the law. Remember? You said it. It was your slogan. We’re just finally taking you up on it.