THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

But Morgan County Alabama Sheriff Ana Franklin does share some things in common with altogether too many other US sheriffs, a willingness to use the office as a power trip and source of personal enrichment.

One evening last fall, an informant for the Morgan County sheriff entered the office of a small construction business near this old river town and, he said, secretly installed spyware on a company computer. He had no warrant.

The sheriff, Ana Franklin, wanted to know who was leaking information about her to a blogger known as the Morgan County Whistleblower.

The blogger had been zeroing in on the sheriff’s finances, specifically $150,000 that by law should have gone toward feeding inmates in the county jail. Instead it had been invested in a now-bankrupt used-car dealership run by a convicted bank swindler.

Now the sheriff has become ensnared, along with others, in a wide-ranging government investigation. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is looking at her stewardship of taxpayer money, as well as the dealership and its financial links to prominent people in town, including several state law enforcement agents, according to more than a half-dozen people who say they have spoken to the F.B.I. Government divers recently searched the bottom of a creek for evidence.

What, if anything, investigators have uncovered is not known. But The New York Times found that since taking office in 2011, Sheriff Franklin has failed to comply with court orders, has threatened critics with legal action and has not publicly accounted for tens of thousands of dollars raised through charity events.

Her activities point to questions about the broad powers afforded America’s county sheriffs, newly emboldened in the era of President Trump. Unlike appointed municipal police chiefs, sheriffs answer only to voters, giving them often-unfettered dominion not just over county law enforcement but over the jail and the lucrative service contracts that go with it.

“In certain jurisdictions there is a feeling by sheriffs that this is my fiefdom — I am in charge, my way or the highway,” said Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer at the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, which has filed lawsuits against a number of sheriffs. “Sometimes that kind of culture can lead to sort of a sheriffs-gone-wild kind of behavior.”

If these officers of the law are also politicians, their politics have increasingly adhered to the idea of the sheriff as an almost mythic figure — a pure expression of democracy, local protector of the people, accountable only to the people. In recent years, a group of activist sheriffs has coalesced around such hot-button conservative issues as gun rights, immigration and the use of federal lands in the West.

“Mostly we protect people from criminals, but sometimes we protect them from an overreaching government,” said Brad Rogers, the sheriff of Elkhart County, Ind. He added: “I’m answerable to the people. I have a face and a name. Try asking the federal government for a face and a name.”

The apotheosis of the idea that federal and state law is subordinate to local authority is Joe Arpaio, the former Arizona sheriff who earned notoriety for his aggressive pursuit of unauthorized Latino immigrants. After the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Conn., hundreds of sheriffs allied with Mr. Arpaio signed a pledge not to enforce the Obama administration’s gun-control proposals.

Ultimately, Mr. Arpaio was convicted of contempt for defying a federal judge’s order to stop violating immigrants’ constitutional rights. But Mr. Trump pardoned him over the summer, seemingly endorsing his view of local authority. Indeed, the Trump administration has instructed sheriffs to disregard federal law and detain undocumented immigrant suspects longer than a number of federal judges have said is constitutionally allowed. And when the president announced this month that he was drastically shrinking two national monuments in Utah, he cast the decision in terms of protecting citizens from “federal overreach.”

These tin star despots can whine all they want about "federal overreach" but that does not protect them from state and local laws against theft, breaking and entering and others that they are charged with enforcing. What they do use is an almost feudal atmosphere in their jurisdictions that lets them believe the end justifies the means. It never does.