A secret cache of electronic records containing information that is potentially embarrassing to political figures, and the criminal handling of that database, is of course an all-too-familiar story to those of us who have been following the saga of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s e-mails, which were originally in digital form, were converted into paper printouts, and are now in the process of being redigitized before they are handed over to investigators, a process that only the naïve would believe exists for any purpose other than tampering with the evidence. The Orange County authorities had been using their database, called TRED, for a quarter of a century. Prosecutors were aware of it, and the sheriff’s officers who testified before Judge Goethals had made thousands of entries in it. Yet they could not quite recall its existence when honor, duty, and the law obliged them to do so.

This is not a one-off. Prosecutorial misconduct is a plague upon these United States, from the vodka-pickled Democratic political jihadists in Austin to California, where judges complain of an “epidemic” of prosecutorial misconduct abetted by Democratic attorney general Kamala Harris, who is seeking to replace retiring Barbara Boxer in the Senate.

The Democrats have long been acculturated to the climate of corruption that attends government agencies that are largely free of ordinary accountability, where a carefully cultivated lack of transparency shields operatives from scrutiny and normal oversight. Republicans can rouse themselves to action, if only barely, when this involves the federal Internal Revenue Service or Environmental Protection Agency. But deference to police agencies and prosecutors is so habitual among the members of the law-and-order party that they instinctively look for excuses when presented with obvious examples of police misconduct, and twiddle their thumbs in the 99 percent of cases of prosecutorial misconduct that do not involve a Republican elected official.