A couple of weeks ago, a man from New York by the name of Sam Antar forwarded a zip drive to the Securities and Exchange Commission containing 37,000 documents that regulators wanted to see—a quarter of a million pages in all. “Just to open each file,” he told me, “I calculated that at a rate of two files a minute, it would take an SEC investigator, working seven hours a day, eight weeks to get through them all.”

Antar spent weeks fighting the agency over this, but eventually he decided the legal expenses of fighting it in court would be too crushing. It’s hard to be too sympathetic with Antar at first blush. When the SEC wants documents, it should get them, right? After all, everyone wants a vigorous, crime-fighting SEC. But in this case, the commission wasn’t targeting adversaries, but allies.

And that’s just one of the reasons why this probe smacks of the SEC’s infamous persecution of David Einhorn—a short-seller who was targeted rather than a company that he believed was engaged in improper practices, which the SEC eventually sanctioned. This is the kind of thing that has gotten me to increasingly wonder: What in heaven’s name is the SEC thinking? Is it completely out to lunch?

The target of the investigation is a California-based research firm called the Fraud Discovery Institute. Antar happens to be friends with FDI’s owner Barry Minkow. And, like Minkow, Antar is a noted whistleblower on white-collar crime and securities fraud. He’s a former fraudster who masterminded the Crazy Eddie stock fraud in the 1980s. Minkow served time in prison for the ZZZZ Best stock swindle, but now is an ordained minister and preaches the straight and narrow.

The subpoenas to both men sought documents concerning companies FDI has criticized, namely InterOil Corp., Lennar Corp., Pre-Paid Legal Services Inc., Medifast Inc., Herbalife Ltd., and Usana Health Sciences Inc. The SEC wants to know what contacts Minkow and Antar have had with a bunch of people on these companies, all apparently short-sellers—horrors!—but with three notable exceptions. What gives this little-known story—here’s the only press coverage—a strange odor is that the SEC wants to know from both Minkow and Antar what they have been saying to the media. The agency has subpoenaed their emails to two reporters for Dow Jones News Service, Michael Rapoport and Ben Dummett, who both have written articles on Interoil. Neither journalist was subpoenaed.