Damage Done to Justice System Won’t Be Fixed by Shutdown’s End

Years of work on terrorism investigations may be wasted due to the government shutdown.

That’s just one result of the month-long political stalemate over a border wall that President Donald Trump says would help fight crime. The shutdown instead hindered drug, gang, and terror investigations, and led to the loss of critical intelligence that at least one FBI agent says is lost forever.

The feds couldn’t help out with a local murder case. Counter-terrorism sources vanished. Drug and immigration cases faltered at the border, of all places.

The impasse robbed some 800,000 federal workers of timely pay. Judiciary employees, public ...