Finally! House Leaders Demand New York DA Cough Up Rationale for Trump Indictment

Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool Photo via AP

Three House GOP committee chairs have sent a letter to Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, demanding he show his work supporting an indictment of Donald Trump.

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The two-and-a-half-page letter from House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, James Comer of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, and Bryan Steil of the House Accountability Committee takes Bragg to task for attempting to shoehorn a local alleged misdemeanor into a federal felony by a former president and current presidential candidate after other police agencies had long dropped the farce.

“You are reportedly about to engage in an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority: the indictment of a former President of the United States and current declared candidate for that office,” the letter began.

It acknowledges what everyone knows but the Left refuses to condemn: that the U.S., New York State, and Manhattan justice systems have been digging for something to get Trump on for years, and they have failed.

“This indictment comes after years of your office searching for a basis—any basis—on which to bring charges, ultimately settling on a novel legal theory untested anywhere in the country and one that federal authorities declined to pursue,” the chairmen alleged. Then they appealed to Bragg’s ethics and sense of history, which, of course, was like shouting into the wind. “If these reports are accurate, your actions will erode confidence in the evenhanded application of justice and unalterably interfere in the course of the 2024 presidential election,” they wrote.

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The committee chairs laid out why they have a horse in the race and why they have oversight.

“[Y]our apparent decision to pursue criminal charges where federal authorities declined to do so requires oversight to inform potential legislative reforms about the delineation of prosecutorial authority between federal and local officials,” wrote the three chairmen.

Related: Of Course Donald Trump Could Be Charged at Any Moment by an Unethical, Spiteful Prosecutor

They described the reports of Bragg’s zealous pursuit of Trump as “a politically motivated prosecution—while adopting progressive criminal justice policies that allow career ‘criminals [to] run[ ] the streets’ of Manhattan.” They noted that such overreach “requires congressional scrutiny about how public safety funds appropriated by Congress are implemented by local law-enforcement agencies.”

The trio questioned bringing a misdemeanor “subject to a two-year statute of limitations, which would have expired long ago.” They noted the recent ferocity with which Bragg, who campaigned for office by saying he would get Trump, had attempted to apply a “State law [that] allows a district attorney to ‘elevate nominal misdemeanor conduct’ to a felony charge if the ‘intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.’ Such a showing would extend the statute of limitations to five years—which would likely expire soon and thus explains your rush to indictment.”

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Bragg will do anything for his Party. He’d fit right in with Stalin’s secret police capo, Lavrentiy Beria, who famously said, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Stalin’s regime wasn’t called a Reign of Terror for nothing.

The gratuitous and frivolous prosecutions against Trump are just the beginning, of course.

Meanwhile, the feds have tracked phones to find people — and are still seeking people — who might have been near the Capitol Building on Jan. 6, 2021, so they can desperately conjure any charge, no matter how minor, with which to prosecute them. As the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project discovered, the Justice Department devoted 16,000 more hours (and counting) to prosecute Dubuque grandmas and their Proud Boys FBI informants than D.C.-based BLM and Antifa riots.

It’s like the prescient 2011 book Three Felonies a Day: How the Feds Target the Innocent, in which author Harvey A. Silverglate argued that federal prosecutors can and do “pin arguable federal crimes on any one of us, for even the most seemingly innocuous behavior.” (Some of the behavior wasn’t innocuous, of course. You can’t clock a cop and not expect to pay for it, unless you’re with BLM or Antifa.)

Related: Is NYC District Attorney Prepping the Jeffrey Epstein Suite at Rikers for Re-Elect Trump HQ?

Silverglate couldn’t have foreseen January 6, but he did see the prosecutorial writing on the wall. He predicted what could happen when “the volume of federal crimes in recent decades has increased well beyond the statute books handing federal prosecutors an additional trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets.” Could he have foreseen a time when the FBI law enforcement agency turned into an FSB-like internal intelligence service?

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One wonders if the author could have conceived of how the United States’ so-called justice system would work against people seeking redress of grievances — or a free, personalized tour of the Capitol. At any rate, January 6 prosecutors did indeed dig for a “trove of vague and exceedingly complex and technical prohibitions to stick on their hapless targets.”

To make charges sound more serious for those in or around the Capitol Building that day, the feds took out of mothballs a 1982 law to protect victims that was later given a polish in the post-Enron era to go after people like Hillary Clinton, for destroying documents that would ultimately impede “an official proceeding.”  

For J6ers, the “official proceeding” in this case was the official certification of the election results, which had already been delayed by the appeal for an audit by Sen. Ted Cruz. As Cruz and colleagues demanded such an audit, the breach of the Capitol Building started. After the unrest was quelled, Cruz and company dropped their appeals and the election results were ratified that evening.

The non-violent people who trespassed or were invited by police to come inside the Capitol Building and wandered around were then hit with “impeding an official proceeding” and were charged with a felony to inflate the incident. By way of contrast, the screeching women who clawed at doors and disrupted “an official proceeding” during Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings were never charged. And the people paraded before the Judiciary Committee who perjured themselves about Kavanaugh in an attempt to “impede an official proceeding,” were never prosecuted.

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It must be grand to be an untouchable.

And now it’s Trump’s turn again. This lawfare, as the Left refers to its convergence of warfare with endless lawsuits, is why Jordan is asking for three things from the Manhattan DA:

1. All documents and communications between or among the New York County District Attorney’s Office and the U.S. Department of Justice, its component entities, or other federal law enforcement agencies referring or relating to your office’s investigation of President Donald Trump;

2. All documents and communications sent or received by former employees Carey Dunne and Mark Pomerantz referring or relating to President Donald Trump; and

3. All documents and communications referring or relating to the New York County District Attorney Office’s receipt and use of federal funds.

It’s not that Trump has done anything illegal; it’s just that the Democrats don’t like him, or his political party, and they really don’t like his can-do attitude about America.

It’s as simple as that.

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