It’s hard to restrain one’s typewriter in trying to capture the bonfire of hypocrisy that is engulfing the effort to bring President Trump to book in New York for what he sees as Stormy Daniels’ attempt to extort him. That was before District Attorney Alvin Bragg filed a lawsuit in federal court, as he did today, seeking to quash a subpoena that has gone out from the House to a renegade former member of Mr. Bragg’s office.

We have endured, after all, the last two years, watching a prosecution of the January 6 rioters that must set some kind of record in unconstitutionality. In broad daylight, a special House committee mocked the constitutional prohibition on attainder. It held a legislative trial of President Trump even while he was being investigated criminally by the Justice Department and, more recently, a special prosecutor.

The legislature and the prosecutors it hired pursued Mr. Trump and his allies — and lawyers, for crying out loud — as did the executive branch’s prosecutors. There was nary a peep of protest from any Democrats in Congress or the press against the aggressiveness, the attainder, of the J6 Committee. It reportedly hired 14 ex-federal prosecutors, while excluding from its membership any pro-Trump Republicans.

Now, though, the prospect of Congress investigating Mr. Bragg’s own actions has put the district attorney of New York into a panic. The suit filed by Mr. Bragg today in the federal court for the Southern District of New York is against Congressman Jim Jordan, a generally heroic Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee. Its main ask is for the court to block a subpoena to a former deputy to Mr. Bragg.

The ex-deputy, Mark Pomerantz, quit in a cloud of vainglory when it seemed that Mr. Bragg would shrink from indicting Mr. Trump. Now Mr. Bragg is afraid of what Mr. Pomerantz might tell Congress about the inner workings of the case. Yet  Democrats, in various cases in this vast fight, have not hesitated in trying to force Mr. Trump’s own staff and lawyers to testify against him. 

Now it’s Mr. Bragg who’s claiming that he will “suffer imminent irreparable harm if the secret and privileged material is compelled to be disclosed, including but not limited to irreparable harm to New York’s sovereign dignitary interests.” No Democrat, leastwise Mr. Bragg, piped up with any such objection when the constitutional shoe, so to speak, was on the Republicans’ foot. 

Mr. Bragg argues that “subpoenaing a former line prosecutor to talk about an ongoing criminal prosecution and investigation is no less of an affront to state sovereignty than subpoenaing the District Attorney himself.” One can’t help think that he’s worried more about himself than his erstwhile deputy. He wants a permanent protection for himself, and others, from any future subpoenas from the Judiciary Committee.

We are not entirely without sympathy for Mr. Bragg, whose invocation of  federalism is well-sourced in the Constitution. The precedent for such aggressive subpoenaing was, however, set by the Democrats of the 117th Congress. Mr. Bragg is in hot pursuit of Mr. Trump. To “anchor in the harbor of justice,” to use one of our favorite phrases of President Coolidge, would be to hold all sides to the same standard of due process.