The charging document issued by the office of Jeanine Pirro, public prosecutor for the city of Washington, says that Nikki Floris denied under oath having had any part in the investigations or knowing anything of Hunter's laptop. On the contrary, the prosecutors contend, for more than a year she sent letters to and received them from the men working the case, and composed the bureau's replies to press reports about that same laptop as they appeared. Pirro declared in a public statement that no one is above the law and that all who obstruct the truth will pay. Senator Charles Grassley had already published in 2023 that the unit, as he put it, had branded reports gathered from informants with the false name of foreign deception. What the accused answer, the reports do not say; and so far no judge has pronounced anything, only a prosecutor.

Consider, moreover, the name itself. It was called a unit against foreign intrigue; if the charges are true, it was covering domestic matters. Nothing new: a prince's intelligence men plead foreign enemies and watch domestic ones. And that phrase, I knew nothing, is old, the phrase of servants who ought to know and prefer not to have known. At court ignorance has a price, and the higher the price the nearer the ignorant man stands to the secrets of power; for he who knows nothing can betray nothing, and protects his master, whoever that may be, with silence.

But the other side must not go unspoken. In the same month, a few weeks before the midterm elections, the house of Ilhan Omar, who sits in the assembly, had been searched by federal agents, and officials in California who count the votes were threatened with prison. Hunter himself, pardoned by his father near the end of his reign, already stands out of range; the servants remain. We remember how it went after Sejanus fell: not he now, but his friends and clients were dragged through the courts, and those who had courted him yesterday accused today. Among them one knight, who confessed he had courted Sejanus because everyone did, was saved by the firmness of his defence; the rest, who denied it, perished.

Yet the charge is not light. To lie to the senate, which alone keeps the right of inquiry, is to cheat what remains of liberty; if servants may not-know with impunity, the Curia becomes a mask and the inquiry a show. I, who gave my vote under Domitian, know how readily servants obey: "Soon it was our hands that dragged Helvidius to prison." But I know this too: if every reign prosecutes the servants of the last, no one will serve the truth, all will serve the faction of the hour. What is granted today against opponents, a worse man will use tomorrow against his own.

There is one remedy, and an old one: let the trial be held in the open, let the accused be heard, let the letters and testimony the prosecutors brandish be read aloud in public, and let the senate hand its records down entire to posterity. For "I hold it the chief duty of annals that virtues not be passed over in silence, and that evil words and deeds should fear the infamy of posterity." Where the prosecutor pronounces before the judge and the servant knows nothing before the senate, both have the same master: the faction.