Republicans’ response to the Mar-a-Lago search is disturbing and dangerous

“Lock her up, lock her up.”

Donald Trump’s supporters lobbed this rallying cry at Hillary Clinton in 2016 — hoping for the imprisonment of a political opponent for allegedly mishandling classified material. Now, however, some of the same people appear to believe that even a rule-of-law investigation of Mr. Trump for a possible violation of the same set of rules is out of order.

The FBI executed a search warrant at Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida this week as part of what The Post reports is an investigation into the potential mishandling of White House documents. The National Archives discovered about seven months ago that the former president had taken more than a dozen boxes of files with him when he left office, some of them marked “top secret” — and suspected, it seems, that the documents he handed over to investigators this spring represented only a portion of the trove.