Mayor Marty Walsh and his minions may be disavowing any role in jumpstarting a Huffington Post takedown of US Attorney Carmen Ortiz, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t thrilled to see it.

The 3,200-word piece was a journalistic indictment of Ortiz, who, the headline claims, is “building a career indicting the good guys.” If Ortiz and her team at the US attorney’s office think the piece overreaches and is a bit one-sided, her critics must be thinking, well, now they know how it feels to be other end of this whole indictment business.

Former federal judge Nancy Gertner tells HuffPo that Ortiz’s serial prosecutions of two Walsh administration officials and a slew of other public officials and activists constitute “an abuse of power.” Noted civil liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate says Ortiz “has a long history of what I consider to be highly questionable prosecutions, particularly against political figures.”

Most noteworthy, however, is the barrage of broadsides fired by the state’s former top prosecutor, ex-attorney general Martha Coakley.

Coakley, whose cautious, understated style as attorney general carried over to her less than electrifying candidacy for governor two years ago, cuts loose with a string of sharply critical quotes that suggest Ortiz is ignoring serious crimes ranging from financial fraud and terrorism to human trafficking and focusing instead on questionable cases where “there’s a competing social interest, sort of civil disobedience context.”

Ryan Grim, the HuffPo Washington bureau chief who penned the piece along with staffer Daniel Marans, tells the Boston Herald the trigger for the piece was the indictment in May of Walsh aide Ken Brissette, who is charged with extortion in connection with allegedly compelling a City Hall music festival to hire union workers in order to receive city permits for the event. A second City Hall aide, Tim Sullivan, was charged in the case last week.

But Grim says he’s been watching Ortiz’s moves ever since her hacking case against internet activist Aaron Swartz, whom Grim says he knew. Grim says the recent City Hall indictments reminded him of the Swartz case, “of building a mountain out of nothing.”

Whether Ortiz is building cases out of nothing is, of course, a matter of opinion.

Grim and Marans have settled on a storyline that has Ortiz targeting “progressives,” a catch-all category that appears to apply to anyone in the Massachusetts political world, including the roguish former head of the state probation department, who was installed by former House speaker Tom Finneran, hardly anyone’s idea of a liberal lion.

When Coakley says Ortiz has brought charges in cases where there is also “a competing social interest, sort of civil disobedience context,” the article seems to tie that to the City Hall indictments. The piece goes on to say these are part of a pattern in which Ortiz “has prosecuted progressives for minor offenses.”

The idea that Brissette and Sullivan were just acting as modern-day Joe Hills has some appeal, and it certainly fits with Walsh’s clear pro-labor profile. But pushing a labor agenda is still different from delivering an ultimatum to hire union workers that may not even have been needed.

The story spotlights some cases that seem like clear overreach, notably the pursuit of a one-time Homeland Security staffer who had an undocumented immigrant cleaning her condo.

But the piece overreaches itself when it chalks up the recent case against state probation officials as criminalizing the time-honored practice of hiring the friends and family of connected pols. The probation hiring fraud involved an elaborate effort to rig the scoring system for hiring job candidates.

The piece also seems to suggest former House speaker Sal DiMasi was the victim of this broad witch hunt against progressives, saying the “underlying facts” of the bribery case against him look more like “everyday lobbying.” If pocketing $65,000 while serving as House speaker to rig a state contract is now “everyday lobbying,” we’re in worse shape than imagined. (DiMasi’s eight year prison sentence did strike many as overly harsh, but that’s an issue to take up with the judge, not the prosecutors.)

Ortiz’s track record certainly provides plenty of material for scrutiny. Whether she is the monstrously overzealous prosecutor critics say, however, is, like the decision to pursue some of the cases her office has prosecuted, ultimately a matter of judgement.

–MICHAEL JONAS

BEACON HILL 

House and Senate lawmakers reach a deal on transgender legislation. (State House News)

In a wide-ranging interview, Senate President Stan Rosenberg said he’d vote to eliminate the archaic Governor’s Council. “I think we could do very well without it,” he proclaimed. (Greater Boston)

Ballot questions legalizing marijuana, protecting farm animals, boosting the number of charter schools, and adding a second slots parlor will appear on the November ballot. The slots parlor question is definitely the oddball of this group; it’s being run by someone who wants to fly under the radar.

The Supreme Judicial Court ruled the ballot question to legalize and regulate marijuana can move forward but the justices tweaked the referendum’s title and the one-sentence statement. (Associated Press)

The Senate prepares to take up legislation restricting the use of credit scores in hiring. (Salem News)

MUNICIPAL MATTERS

Weymouth Mayor Robert Hedlund has asked a developer to expand his apartment project in Weymouth Landing, that has already come under fire for being too large, in an effort to help the town land a $2 million state grant. (Patriot Ledger)

Columnist Yvonne Abraham says Mayor Marty Walsh, who “jumped headlong into the fast lane” in signing an agreement with Boston Grand Prix, bears some responsibility for the fact that thousands of people who bought tickets for the canceled are now unlikely to ever see refunds. (Boston Globe)

Brockton officials are continuing their drive to crack down on homeless people, clearing out new encampments that have sprung up after city workers razed a decades-old “Tent City.” (The Enterprise)

Telegram & Gazette columnist Dianne Williamson apologizes to Ray Mariano, the retiring head of the Worcester Housing Authority. Williamson said she criticized Mariano’s lack of credentials when he was initially appointed 13 years ago, but now acknowledges “his work has been nothing short of remarkable.”

Ashland selectmen have agreed to buy a former Girl Scouts’ camp for $400,000, with plans to site a sewage treatment facility there and maintain some area for recreational use. (MetroWest Daily News)

WASHINGTON/NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL

Gloucester Police Chief Leonard Campanello, after a meeting at the White House, blasts Republicans for paring back President Obama’s request for opioid addiction funding. (Eagle-Tribune)

ELECTIONS 

Donald Trump breathed new life into two fading controversies, angrily defending his tweet that some have claimed used the Star of David to label Hillary Clinton corrupt and doubling down on his praise of Saddam Hussein as an efficient killer of terrorists. (New York Times)

Trump’s short list for vice president has shrunk as two potential running mates, Sens. Bob Corker of Tennessee and Joni Ernst of Iowa, took their names out of consideration. (U.S. News & World Report)

Jim O’Sullivan has some fun using itinerant Senate seat seeker Scott Brown’s own words about how he’s thisclose to Trump. (Boston Globe)

Sen. Ted Cruz has been quietly shaking up his office staff and expanding his political operation as he gears up for another national run in 2020. (National Review)

BUSINESS/ECONOMY 

About 30 people protest outside Textron Weapon and Sensor Systems in Wilmington, calling on the company to stop producing cluster bombs and selling them to Saudi Arabia. (Lowell Sun)

EDUCATION

The cost of attending UMass schools could go up 5 to 8 percent, much faster than inflation. (State House News)

A state audit found problems with internal procedures at Massachusetts Maritime Academy in tracking assets and protecting the school against fraud. (Cape Cod Times)

HEALTH/HEALTH CARE 

In the second part of a three-part Globe Spotlight Team report on the state’s shredded mental health care system, the focus is on the interaction between those with mental illness and the police, encounters that can end tragically in what many say are preventable deaths.

The prescribing of opioids by Massachusetts physicians has dropped sharply. (Boston Globe) Underscoring how that could impact the overdose crisis, state data show that two of every three people who fatally overdosed in 2014 had a prior opioid prescription. (Boston Herald)

TRANSPORTATION 

A new push for Boston Harbor ferry service. (Boston Globe)

ENERGY/ENVIRONMENT 

The state Department of Environmental Protection gives the green light to a Kinder Morgan pipeline through Otis State Forest. (Berkshire Eagle)

A busy day for shark watchers on the Cape as researchers tagged two great whites off Eastham and Chatham beaches. (Cape Cod Times)

CRIMINAL JUSTICE/COURTS 

A Globe review of criminal convictions shows that more than three dozen people convicted of rape in the state in recent years were sentenced to no jail time.

Former Boston Bruins defenseman Ray Bourque admits sufficient facts in his drunken driving case, triggering a 45-day license loss on top of a 180-day license suspension for refusing to take a Breathalyzer. (Eagle-Tribune)

A Lowell man out on bail on a charge of indecent assault in that city was arrested and charged with raping a woman he followed out of an MBTA station in Quincy. (Patriot Ledger)

A Gloucester man and his family are being arraigned on brawl charges in connection with what some say was a racially tinged incident. (Gloucester Times)

MEDIA 

As the Boston Globe prepares to move its printing operations to Taunton, it is closing a Millbury facility and eliminating 12 jobs. (Telegram & Gazette)

A former Fox News anchor has filed suit against the network’s conservative rainmaker Roger Ailes, claiming he made lewd sexual comments and advances to her and demoted her when she complained about harassment and on-air sexism from other anchors. (New York Times)

After 86 years of family ownership, The Record in Bergen County, New Jersey, is sold to Gannett. (The Record)