The apparently imminent indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has short-circuited a number of prominent Republican officials, causing them to crazily careen in different directions to try to undermine the prosecutor.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis — along with New Yorkers who should know better, like Rep. Nicole Malliotakis — have accused Bragg of ignoring skyrocketing violent crime, despite the fact that crimes like homicides and shootings have actually gone down in Manhattan in recent months, and this remains one of the safest big cities in the country.
Three House GOP committee chairs then upped the ante by sending Bragg a letter demanding he testify before Congress and accusing him of a politically motivated prosecution. Never mind that Bragg is a state-level official elected by Manhattan voters, with no federal role for Congress to oversee. Spurious claims of misconduct aside, such allegations would be addressed by the Legislature in Albany or by state courts.
It’s particularly ironic that this is coming from the gang that has spent the last several months crowing about the weaponization of government, going so far as to establish a House Subcommittee ostensibly focused exclusively on that issue.
In practice, the committee has been just another forum to push culture war nonsense and advance the fatuous argument that Twitter was involved in some kind of conspiracy with the Biden campaign, all an effort to distract from the very real efforts to subvert American democracy perpetrated by Trump and his political allies. If the GOP members wanted to actually do the job the committee’s title implies, they would be better served calling out the inappropriate effort to investigate and intimidate Bragg for doing the job he was elected to do.
Instead, the subcommittee’s chair is none other than perennial Trumpy gadfly Jim Jordan, who in his capacity as Judiciary Committee chair was one of the people who sent Bragg the letter in the first place. If Jordan truly wants to see the face of weaponization of government, he needs only look in the mirror.
