The question, as the same outlets report from The Wall Street Journal, is whether she or her late father, Nur Omar Mohamed, altered her age on the citizenship papers of the year 2000 so that she appeared to be seventeen rather than eighteen. For if she was a minor, she became a citizen through her father; if an adult, she had to apply in her own name. Certain officials are said to have told the same newspaper that the aim of the inquiry is to strip her of citizenship and expel her from the country. They add that the same tip, under Biden's administration, was dropped by the same investigators for want of evidence. Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, said on Fox News that several investigations are under way, among them one into her financial disclosures. Omar replied that political enemies are being targeted, that the force of the law is being turned into a faction's weapon, and that she will not be silenced. Donald Trump, as The Daily Wire alone reports, declined on Tuesday to say she should be deported, but at a rally in Arizona on the eve of the Ides he mocked her Somali origins.

Nor am I the man to wish a fraud, if fraud was committed, to go unpunished. Citizenship is a prize, not a gift of chance; whoever obtained it by a lie obtained it by theft. Nor should I pass over what the Daily Mail reports, that her staff, a few months after the election of 2018, had her date of birth changed in Minnesota's official records; on whose authority and on what documents that was done is for the judges to inquire. But I ask you, citizens: what new thing has been found that was not found under the previous administration? The reports are silent. Why was the house searched barely three weeks before an election in which she is standing again, when, as The Guardian points out, the Justice Department customarily avoids any public investigative step against a candidate within sixty days of an election? On this too they are silent.

I once defended the poet Aulus Licinius Archias, whose citizenship had been called into question because the records of Heraclea had perished by fire in the Italian War. What did we do then? We brought witnesses, Lucius Lucullus and envoys from Heraclea; judges, not soldiers, gave their verdict on the man's citizenship. That is a prosecution: a definite charge, a named accuser, a judge, an appointed day, the right of reply. And what is a proscription? First the enemy's name is chosen, the charge is sought afterwards, and it is sought at the moment when the search will do the most harm.

This I learned in my own case, when Publius Clodius carried a bill aimed not at a deed but at a man, and my house on the Palatine was pulled down so that a little shrine to Liberty might be set on its ground. And the present affair is graver still, because it is directed not at some private person but at a woman sent to the assembly by the votes of the people, and directed at her just when the people are about to judge her again. Whoever hands the power of revoking citizenship to those who long to win an election does not protect the republic; he arms a faction. "Those who look after one part of the citizens and neglect another bring into the state the most ruinous thing of all: sedition and discord."

For citizenship is a pledge of faith, which the republic gives and, once given, is bound to keep. "The foundation of justice is good faith." Leon Fresco, who directed immigration matters in the Justice Department under Obama, is said to have told The Wall Street Journal that the whole case turns on proving that she herself, not her father, lied. Rightly so: for if a father's fault can be transferred to his daughter, then a girl, what new citizen will be safe? As for mocking her origins, that bears not on the charge but on the insult; and no judge ever based his verdict on the defendant's nation unless he was an unjust one.

This being so, the remedy is at hand, and it is not new. Let the grand jury in Minnesota hear the evidence; let the prosecutors, if they have anything, bring it forward in open court, and after the election, not before; let Pirro speak in the forum, not on television. If the crime is proved, let the penalty the law prescribes follow, loss of citizenship included; if not, let the accusers bear the brand of malicious prosecution. As consul I convicted Catiline's accomplices not by rumours but by letters sealed with their own seals; let the same law hold now. For whoever learns today to tear citizenship from an opponent will learn tomorrow to have it torn from himself. A citizenship that can be snatched away at a faction's pleasure is no citizenship at all, but a tenancy held on sufferance.