# Fishing Expedition **The model:** An investigation without a defined target — casting broad demands for documents, testimony, or data in hopes that *something* incriminating surfaces. The metaphor marks the line between investigating a crime and investigating a person: legitimate process starts from predicate facts and narrows; a fishing expedition starts from a target and trawls. ## The Mechanism Broad discovery is costly to the fished regardless of guilt: legal fees, exposure of unrelated embarrassments, and process crimes generated by the investigation itself (perjury traps in interviews about non-crimes). The expedition therefore works as punishment without conviction. Every procedural regime has anti-fishing devices — particularity requirements for warrants, relevance limits in discovery, predicate rules for grand juries — and every era's dominant faction tests them. ## KB Applications ### The accusation as boomerang "Fishing expedition" is simultaneously a real abuse and the reflexive cry of the legitimately investigated — the vault's [[Elite Impunity]] files show the phrase deployed against document subpoenas that were, in fact, tightly predicated. The diagnostic: check the *predicate*. Was there a specific factual basis and scope, or a target and a trawl? The answer sorts weaponization claims from accountability avoidance. ### Weaponized-government discourse The 2025–26 retribution cycle — enemies-list prosecutions, security-clearance strips, IRS referral threats — is the expedition model industrialized; predicates replaced by lists. Cross-read with [[Rule of Law]] and the [[January 6 Capitol Attack]] counter-investigations. ## See Also - [[Prima Facie]] — the predicate discipline expeditions lack - [[De Minimis]] — trawls that criminalize trivia - [[Habeas Corpus]] — the body-side check on process abuse