Not just any House Democrat either. It’s Eric Swalwell, a guy with an Avenatti-esque ubiquity on cable news as he gears up for a possible presidential run in 2020. (Which is also Avenatti-esque.) Swalwell’s a member of the House Intelligence Committee and thus often fills the role of anti-Trump TV attack dog for his party during the seven minutes a day that Adam Schiff isn’t in front of a camera. He’s usually hardcore in his criticism of Trump too, befitting his role. Last month he went on Tucker Carlson’s show(!) to explain why the president is kinda sorta guilty of treason. He calls him a “wrecking ball” and was on Twitter this afternoon begging Jeff Flake to switch parties in disgust at Trump’s tweets about Omarosa. Not a guy inclined to defend the administration, in other words, especially at the expense of the Resistance’s newest hero, Peter Strzok.

But when you’ve embarrassed the FBI as badly as Strzok has, even Swalwell has to draw the line. Via the Free Beacon:

“I would have fired him, too,” Swalwell said on Bloomberg News. “He has rights as an employee, and those should be exhausted, but I also believe as the brother of police officers and a former prosecutor, with the stakes this high, a presidential candidate being investigated, you can’t talk that way, even if it didn’t affect the investigation.”

Which is obviously correct. Strzok’s behavior is the strongest evidence Trump has that there really is a highly politicized “deep state” that’s out to get him. That’s why Mueller punted him off the Russiagate probe once he found out about the texts to Lisa Page. If you care about the reputations of the FBI and the IC, as an intel committee member like Swalwell presumably does, you should want him made an example of. Instead the left is turning him into a cause celebre, playing directly into Trump’s hands by claiming unprofessional anti-Trump FBI agents as de facto members of Team Blue. It’s idiotic.

But they’re tightening their embrace. As I write this at a little after 6 p.m. ET, Strzok’s GoFundMe page stands north of $340,000. He’s got an outside shot at hitting $400,000 before midnight but he’ll get there by tomorrow morning for sure. His fundraiser’s goal was set initially at $150,000; it’s gradually been increased to the point where it now sits at half a million dollars, a number he may well reach as early as tomorrow afternoon. Of all the things liberals could do with their money, from donating it to worthy charities to contributing to Democratic campaigns to kicking in for the hundreds of FBI agents who haven’t grossly embarrassed their agency and compromised the Russiagate probe with garbage judgment, they’ve decided to pour ResistanceBucks into Strzok’s piggy bank in the belief that the richer Strzok gets the more Trump will cry. Or, to phrase that in Twitter-ese, they’re going to gift Pete Strzok with a trust fund to own the cons.

Data journalists should turn the Andrew McCabe and Strzok fundraising hauls into an analysis: “Exactly how sh*tty an FBI agent do you need to be to rake in an even million dollars online?”

The icing on the cake, of course, is that Strzok will shortly be rolling in dough anyway once he gets his book deal and starts doing the progressive media circuit. What an embarrassment.