By any fair measure, Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago scandal has literally nothing to do with state government. A former federal official allegedly took federal documents from a federal building in violation of federal law.

And yet, a group of Republican state attorneys general have apparently taken a keen interest in the investigation anyway. The Washington Post reported:

Texas’s Ken Paxton and 10 other GOP state attorneys general came to the defense of former president Donald Trump on Tuesday in his legal fight over documents the FBI seized last month, filing an amicus brief in a federal appellate court that argued the Biden administration could not be trusted. In a 21-page document that repeated numerous right-wing talking points but that experts said broke little new legal ground, the officials accused the Biden administration of “ransacking” Mar-a-Lago, the Florida home of the former president, during an Aug. 8 court-authorized FBI raid and of politicizing the Justice Department.

Right off the bat, the existence of this amicus brief is weird, since literally all of the underlying questions in this case involve federal issues. There are no state interests here — except to the extent that 11 Republican state attorneys general, led by a scandal-plagued and indicted Texan, feel the need to rally behind a former Republican president.....

The result is an embarrassment: Powerful lawyers set out to defend the former president in the midst of a criminal investigation, and they effectively came up empty. If Paxton and his accomplices think they did their ally a favor yesterday, they’re confused about what just happened.