As Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post wrote today, congressional Democrats are already building the investigative staff of the committees they will begin to lead in January. In a line that shows just how much things have changed, Stein and Roebuck write that the congress members have “been hiring from the large pool of former career prosecutors who were fired or departed from the Justice Department since the start of Trump’s second term.”

As social media user ctrl+alt+RESIST commented: “Trump purged DOJ to bury the evidence and instead handed Congress a staff of people who know exactly where everything is filed. You cannot shred institutional memory. It just changed employers.”

Attorney General Todd Blanche appears to have thought events through in a similar fashion. Today on CNN, he seemed rattled as he tried to frame upcoming investigations as a system of threats and revenge against Republicans. Asked by Dana Bash what crime Democrats were committing by saying they would exercise their duty of oversight, Blanche did not have one. Asked if Democrats should be imprisoned as Trump suggested, Blanche said it depended on what they had done. When asked about the Trump administration’s attacks on Trump’s perceived enemies, he tried to dismiss them by saying such cases are only a few of the thousands the department has brought.