Republicans who are angry over Donald Trump’s indictment are intensifying their campaign against the prosecutor who brought the case against him in an effort to humiliate him in front of his supporters in New York City.
A field hearing for the House Judiciary Committee will take place close to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s offices on Monday. The committee is chaired by Ohio Republican U.S. Rep. Jim Jordan.
The committee’s majority of Republicans describes it as an investigation of the “pro-crime, anti-victim” policies of the Democrats. U.S. Rep. Andy Biggs, a Republican from Arizona and a member of the committee claimed on Twitter that Bragg had “reduced NYC into a wasteland” and that “lawlessness is completely out of control.”
The hearing, according to Democrats, is a partisan gimmick designed to inflame conservative resentment of Bragg, Manhattan’s first Black district attorney.
Officials from New York City have requested Jordan to postpone the hearing. C-SPAN declined to broadcast it on television.
Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, and former police captain, told CNN on Friday that “this is only an in-kind donation or contribution to the Trump campaign.” “This is basically a sham, and it’s regrettable that they will use government funds to host this pantomime at this time,”
The hearing on Monday is the most recent shot in Jordan’s months-long campaign to use his legislative authority to defend Trump against what he claims is a politically driven investigation.
Jordan claims that because his agency receives federal money, it is under congressional inspection and has written letters to Bragg demanding testimony and records. He summoned Mark Pomerantz, a federal prosecutor who had previously been in charge of the Trump inquiry.
Bragg filed a lawsuit against Jordan last week in an effort to have the subpoena thrown out, calling it a “brazen and unconstitutional attack” and a “transparent campaign of intimidation” against him because of the Trump case. An initial hearing has been scheduled on Wednesday by a federal court.
A House hearing is scheduled for Monday with the goal of bolstering the claim that since Bragg is so preoccupied with Trump, he is allowing street violence to flourish.
Politicians who represent rural and suburban districts frequently use this old ruse to criticize New York City’s officials, who are primarily Democrats, for the city’s crime rate. Although if the city’s violent crime rate is still much lower than the national average, it nonetheless packs a punch with some audiences.
In Manhattan, a borough of 1.6 million inhabitants, there were 78 homicides in 2022, Bragg’s first year in office. That represented a reduction of 15% from the prior year. In contrast, there were 96 murders in Palm Beach County, Florida, which is home to nearly 1.5 million people, including Trump.
Dr. Jeffrey Butts, the head of the Research & Evaluation Center at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, claimed that when people hear the name, New York, they automatically associate it with a crime because they have been conditioned to do so. It’s not true. Only the tales that people tell.
If you’re from a little, predominately white Iowa county, Butts explained, when you hear the word, New York, you automatically think of all the spooky movies and TV shows you’ve watched. “In my opinion, Congress is capitalizing on that.”
Republicans and some Democrats have already scrutinized Bragg.
top deputy state attorney general, Harvard-educated former federal prosecutor, and civil rights attorney Bragg won the Democratic party’s eight-way primary before sweeping the general election with 83% of the vote.
Bragg wrote an internal memo shortly after assuming office in which, among other things, he said that his agency will not pursue some low-level offenses.
That sparked some early disagreements with the top brass of the New York Police Department and attracted the attention of Republicans outside the city, who soon used Bragg as a poster child for Democratic laxness.
Republican Lee Zeldin, who at the time served as the congressman for eastern Long Island, made the ouster of independently elected prosecutor Bragg a key component of his campaign for governor.
Zeldin lost, but his anti-crime rhetoric resonated in the suburbs, aiding Republicans in their victories over Democrats in several crucial New York seats.
In actuality, New York was not exempt from the nationwide increase in crime that occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of crime categories in the city continue to be above 2019 levels. During Bragg’s first year in office, a number of crimes—including burglaries, car thefts, and assaults—rose in Manhattan; but, this year, they have been declining once more.
Despite the attention on Bragg, neither he nor anybody from his office is likely to speak before the House Judiciary Committee. The committee instead intends to question at least six witnesses.
Jose Alba, a former convenience store employee detained after fatally stabbing an assailant at his store, is one of them. Madeline Brame, who accuses Bragg of seeking lengthy prison terms only for two of the four people involved in her son’s killing, and Jennifer Harrison, a victim advocate whose boyfriend was murdered in New Jersey in 2005 — outside Bragg’s jurisdiction and long before he took office — both believe he should have dropped the charges sooner.
The hearing was mocked by Bragg’s campaign in an email to supporters on Friday, calling it a “politically motivated fraud.” The hearing is “an attack on our system of justice,” U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., the committee’s leading Democrat, told the news source Gothamist.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, described the upcoming hearing as “a circus if there ever was one” on Sunday.
Republicans have started a broad oversight agenda since gaining control of the House, looking into the inner workings of President Joe Biden’s administration, his family, and the federal government.
While doing oversight is a crucial duty of Congress, the House GOP’s extensive investigations have frequently produced more flash than substance. Committees led by Jordan and others have received a lot of charges, but they’ve been reluctant to come up with conclusions that hold up and occasionally have even deviated into conspiracy theories.