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I think that's the end result of what's happening now -- if someone isn't willing to indict Biden (and/or Newsom, and whatever) in the next six years, grassroots Republicans will find someone nutty enough to do so, whether or not the law supports that particular matter. It's possible that this turns out to be a sword that doesn't cut both ways, but if so, they're going to go up a rung and chop out sections of the FBI or DoJ until it happens. There's ways you can separate each and every other big-wig politician or politically-connected actor who violated the law and got off scot free, but there's few ways to do so and not seem post-hoc justifications -- and it's far too dangerous a tool to be only available to one team.
And I think that would mollify conservatives, if not necessarily as many Trumpists.
Of course, the flip side is that it'd be extraordinarily bad on its own merits. Even the steelman of 'just' going after 'genuine' cases will result in federal officials facing a barrage of 1983 suits, but conservatives have fifteen or twenty years of genuine or imagined overlooked misbehavior to bring forward.
Is Newsom corrupt? Beyond the usual run of Californian politics, I mean. I was less than gruntled by the description of Ivy Getty's fairy tale wedding, where all the Democrat big names in California were pretty much at the beck and call of the Gettys - there's a thin line between "attending as friend of the family" and "performing favours for the grandees who bankrolled my political career".
He's grandstanding about DeSantis and Florida, but that's par for the course. He avoided the recall due to having the party swing in behind him and campaign on his behalf, but is there any gossip about him being a naughty boy? Apart from the 'dining during Covid' stuff which politicians everywhere were doing (including in my own country).
I don't know that he's (unusually) corrupt, and I doubt most political corruption goes from blue states into deep red ones.
I just don't think corruption is the only or even most available avenue for political indictments. Make a false statement during online fundraising? (State) wire fraud statutes could be written expansively enough to cover anything close to them. Harass a business in another state? Many states, especially southern states, have laws against deprivation and attempted deprivation of right under color of law; these are mostly civil for now, but that's mostly so they're available for private rights of action (and for lower standards of proof) rather than some deep requirement. There's some 11th Amendment complexities, here, but they largely reflect needing to pursue state officials as individuals rather than states themselves -- but if your intent is to harass rather than to get an injunction, that's kinda besides the point.
This isn't something states do, right now; there's a reason that all the handwringing about DeSantis kidnapping charges didn't have people bringing up a potential constitutional crisis. And there's very good reasons that they don't! But it's a weapon on the table.
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And how are they going to do that with the Democrats in control of the Deep State and the presidency? This is the endgame; the Democrats aren't worried about tit-for-tat because they don't intend to relinquish power again.
Naively, there's a chance people will recognize the tooling; politics is at least theoretically anti-inductive. To an extent, this is currently one of Trump's biggest selling points, damning with faint praise as that might be. Given past events, I'm not that optimistic.
More pessimistically... there was a case in the late 90s where a federal agent shot an unarmed woman holding a baby. That case was somewhat complicated over past Supremacy Clause questions over where a federal officer's official processes start and where reasonable behavior ends. But states do not have to limit themselves to good, fair, or honest laws, that a federal employee might only violate when taking their duty to its most extreme edges.
States just don't do that, and that's why you've not heard much about the few cases that even started. And the feds can put the pressures in; the Clinton-era fed put a lot of pressure to get Lon Horuchi's prosecutor limited as much as possible. It's even possible that federal judges will quickly develop new immunities or theories of impossible requirements of standing. But taking it off the table entirely as a threat requires taking every state, not just the federal gov.
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