It already was a strange story, a tragedy, a matter of investigation and a wrongful-death lawsuit likely in the making.

Now there is a legitimate federal political issue in the pre-dawn shooting death March 19 of the gun-peddling Little Rock airport manager Bryan Malinowski in his Chenal home by agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

I could easily see this matter coming up in a Joe Biden-Donald Trump debate in October.

Biden would say that he had issued an executive order requiring body cameras on all federal law enforcement officers and could not fathom that the order was not followed.

Trump would say that the ATF hadn’t taken that order seriously because the order was mere political window-dressing in response to the George Floyd racial furor. He would say the Little Rock case just goes to show that Biden’s government is all about using federal police authority abusively for political aims.

Malinowski had been under surveillance by ATF agents for his active private gun dealing under the so-called gun show loophole, which the Biden administration was gearing up to clamp down on at the time of the raid.

Even amid his hyperbolic bluster and megalomania, Trump might be able to make a case that federal agents sensed their president wanted a scalp to hype his imminent gun show loophole action and got themselves revealed for abusive techniques instead.

Reasonable people already were curious—and conservative people already were suspicious or accusatory—about why the warrant-based raid was conducted by surprise in darkness. That curiosity, suspicion or accusation extended to how it came to be that the agents broke through the door of Malinowski’s home and entered, causing Malinowski, according to his wife, to rise from bed, get one of his guns and head outside his bedroom to find human forms in the darkness and fire on them, injuring one officer’s leg, and getting shot dead in the head in federal-agent reply.

For that matter, the curiosity, suspicion and accusation extended to why ATF didn’t do a “critical incident briefing” to tell the public that very day, or soon after, as much as it could about the series of events that led to the disastrous turn.

Did agents shut off the home’s power, and, if so, why? Since they didn’t carry a no-knock warrant, did they announce themselves loudly enough and wait long enough before prying through the door?

What? What? Those were, and are still, the questions.

Silence. That was, and is still, the answer.

At the time, Bud Cummins, the attorney in Little Rock hired by Malinowski’s widow, told me that, as it fortuitously happened, body cameras had been required from on high, by executive order of President Biden, and those images ought to answer those questions.

Last week, U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and John Boozman announced that they’d pressed the ATF on the body-camera images and that the ATF had responded that body cameras had not been in use in this incident.

I’ve seen three written statements of ATF policy requiring body cams. I’ve read news articles in which the White House heralded Biden’s executive order in March 2022 requiring them.

Now U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, Trumpian extremist, and grandstanding chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, has made a public demand of ATF for an accounting. He seems a legitimate prospect to order committee hearings, having done so on matters of less consequence and of less legitimate curiosity or suspicion.

The ATF explanation that body cameras have been rationed with emphasis on more heavily populated areas … well, if we buy that, are we to treat all presidential executive orders as executive options, less to be obeyed than revised?

Tom Mars, a highly regarded Arkansas lawyer who has emerged as a feared public-interest lawyer and social media gadfly, had been commenting until lately in defense of the ATF and the need for delicacy in the release of information. When I called him the other day to pick his brain, he said, as it happened, that the revelation of the absence of bodycams “has turned me 180.”

There is no good explanation—no explanation conceivably good for the ATF—in the fact that agents weren’t wearing them that morning, he said.

As a former director of the Arkansas State Police, Mars had credibility in telling me no one should read too much into the State Police’s announcement that it is turning over its investigative file on this matter to the Pulaski County prosecuting attorney. A report must be made to someone, and the local prosecutor is basically the person for whom such an investigation is undertaken.

Otherwise, the news is all bad now for the ATF and those, including me, who tend to defend federal law enforcement against right-wing attacks.

Just because an attack is from the right doesn’t mean an extremist critic can’t find an acorn occasionally.