Leonard Leo is hated on the left because he is effective. Even more offensive to the Left, he fights back with tools and weapons the Left has long wielded alone. Now, he’s being subjected to an investigation by his own competition.

The Federalist Society has been one of the great success stories among right-leaning institutions. In the four decades since its founding, it elevated and evangelized originalist and textualist ideas about the interpretation of law — and did so by eschewing activism in favor of open debate and networking. The result was not only a growing body of scholarship and public acceptance of the premises of originalist and textualist analysis, but also a pipeline of talented candidates for the bench prepared to put those ideas into practice in restoring the rule of democratically written law.

But politics is not all high-minded debate. When the names of those candidates were sent up to Capitol Hill, they were regularly met with well-funded and organized public-relations campaigns against them. The tip of the spear for those campaigns were elected officials, media outlets, and the organized bar. Behind the scenes, however, there was also a lot of money for TV and radio ads, sign-holding protesters, and even public-relations firms to represent witnesses with accusations to make against judicial nominees. Much of the financing for these efforts was routed through a “dark money” group, Arabella Advisors, and its network of affiliates. For years, nothing of the sort existed on the right to respond.

A lot of people complained about this asymmetry. Leo decided to do something about it. Because the Federalist Society, with which he was long associated, was not in the activism business, Leo began raising money to build a parallel infrastructure to defend conservative judicial nominees and criticize liberal and progressive nominees, as well as promote other conservative causes.

This inevitably entailed setting up new organizations to operate within the Byzantine legal structure of the nonprofit advocacy world. There is nothing unusual about any of this: Numerous left-wing nonprofits do, too. One of them, styling itself Campaign for Accountability, was launched from the Arabella network and continues to benefit from that network and its contacts for its fundraising.

Campaign for Accountability has targeted Leo, alleging that consulting fees paid by Leo’s nonprofits to other for-profit groups he operates are improper. There is no pretense that such consulting arrangements are unusual in this space. But Campaign for Accountability found a willing client in D.C. attorney general Brian Schwalb, who has dutifully launched an investigation that seeks information about Leo’s network — information valuable to the left-leaning activist journalists who have produced reams of hit pieces in the past few months. Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, led by Dick Durbin and Sheldon Whitehouse, are pursuing a separate investigation of Leo.

In each case, the aims are to impose the costs of the process on Leo, to blacken his reputation, and to gain intelligence on his activities. Schwalb’s interests are apparent: In addition to being an elected Democrat in the bluest jurisdiction in the country, he was previously the partner-in-charge of the home office of a law firm that represented Arabella organizations. His chief deputy, Seth Rosenthal, was formerly legal director of the Alliance for Justice, one of the groups Leo sought to counter.

Investigations of this nature aren’t just an abuse of the legal process and an abuse of D.C.’s jurisdiction over the national capital. They’re also a cheap and shabby way to divert resources and distract the electorate from Schwalb’s own dismal record fighting the kinds of violent crime that plague the residents of his city. But locking up carjackers won’t get you headlines in Politico or the gratitude of your party’s activist and donor class.

(Disclosure: National Review Institute has received grant money from this nonprofit network.)