Editorial: Trump's decision to declassify documents for personal reasons sets dangerous precedent

Again we find ourselves compelled to warn of the consequences of a contemptuous action by President Donald Trump.

This one we preface with a broader caution about precedent: Remember, if we permit the leader of one party to commit acts that undermine the institutions our nation is built on, we free the leader of the opposing party to do the same someday. It does not take a highly trained political analyst to see where such ratcheting indifference will lead.

The specific alarm of the day sounds from President Trump's order - just days after his former campaign manager agreed to cooperate with prosecutors - to declassify documents in the midst of an ongoing FBI investigation of Russian intervention and his own campaign in the 2016 presidential election.

The president assures the public that these documents will demonstrate that, as he tweeted, "Really bad things were happening" when the FBI sought court permission to conduct surveillance on former members of his 2016 campaign staff. Trump said his order will bring "total transparency" to a process he refers to as a "witch hunt," apparently disregarding the growing number of witches it has found - a tally The New York Times puts at more than 100 criminal counts against three companies, 26 Russian nationals and eight people convicted from within Trump's inner circle, including Paul Manafort, the aforementioned campaign manager; George Papadopoulos and Rick Gates, former campaign advisers; Michael Cohen, the president's former personal attorney; and Michael Flynn, his former national security adviser.

With the investigation narrowing around him and the specter of potentially steep losses in the November midterm elections, the president's motives seem less like transparency than self-preservation.

And beyond the political implications, Trump's actions present disturbing omens for our criminal justice system and our republic.

In what other ongoing criminal investigation, for example, would we countenance the release of evidence even before charges are brought - and by a potential focus of the charges? In what other case would we excuse the release of information that - as is possible in the documents Trump has ordered declassified - would identify and possibly endanger witnesses and compromise the effectiveness, not to mention the integrity, of the investigation?

Again, President Trump has shown his willingness to invite confrontations with Congress and his own Department of Justice, to challenge the authority of our legal institutions, to flout complaints that he is abusing the power of his office and interfering with investigations that could focus on him, to disrupt official business in order to influence a pending election and, at the root of it all, to deepen the divisions already roiling the politics of the country.

These are motives we would tolerate from no other political leader. They lay the groundwork for similar abuses from any other leader. That, as much as the dangers specific to this case, is a consequence all freedom-loving people should fear.