After Indictment, DA Tells Trump’s Congressional Henchmen To Get Bent

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Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (Barry Williams/New York Daily News/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)

It’s been a busy week in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. And yet General Counsel Leslie Dubeck still found time to get back to congressional Republicans about their attempt to intimidate the prosecutor for daring to indict Donald Trump.

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House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, flanked by James Comer and Bryan Steil at Oversight and Administration, has been spamming the DA’s office with nastygrams insisting that Article I does too authorize Congress to conduct oversight of state law enforcement agencies. The MENSA squad would also like Bragg to testify and produce every piece of paper in his office with the name Trump on it.

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The justifications for these demands ranges from the bizarre to the tautological. Perhaps the committee is considering legislation that would allow a former president to remove local prosecutions to federal court. Maybe Congress needs to codify procedures for the Secret Service to interact with local law enforcement officials when a protectee is arrested. (Although the politicians fail to explain why they’d need to interrogate the internal case itself in order to determine surrender protocol.) Or maybe if you just shout over and over “The Committee on the Judiciary has an interest in the fair and evenhanded application of justice at both the state and federal level,” everyone will forget all about the Tenth Amendment and Younger abstention.

Well, probably not on that last one. Because of course the DA’s office did notice that there was no citation for that claim, and mentioned it in their response today.

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“Congress has no warrant for interfering with individual criminal investigations—much less investigations conducted by a separate sovereign,” Dubeck wrote, referencing Younger and its progeny, and adding that “based on your reportedly close collaboration with Mr. Trump in attacking this Office and the grand jury process, it appears you are acting more like criminal defense counsel trying to gather evidence for a client than a legislative body seeking to achieve a legitimate legislative objective.”

Trump’s coordination with congressional Republicans to ratf*ck the New York indictment has been covered by CNN, which reports that the former president speaks to Rep. Jordan regularly, as well as Conference Chair Elise Stefanik and roving wingnut Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. The prosecutor accuses the committee chairs of using federal funding for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office as “a baseless pretext to interfere with our Office’s work,” noting that Rep. Greene recently tweeted that “Biden’s DOJ is coordinating with the Democrat Manhattan DA,” adding that “Republicans in Congress MUST subpoena these communists and END this! We have the power to do it and we also have the power to DEFUND their salaries and departments!” Dubeck flags this as an explicit admission that the purpose of subpoenaing prosecutors is to “END” the investigations of Trump.

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And while Jordan et al would like to use federal funds as a lever for oversight, the letter points out that the federal government’s allocations to the DA to prevent violence against women and protect victim’s rights is greatly dwarfed by money going the other directions thanks to asset forfeitures.

As for the suggestion that Congress might draft some kind of criminal analog to the Westfall Act allowing former presidents to evade local law enforcement, well …

You suggest that your request has a valid legislative purpose because Congress may consider legislation to shield former presidents from state criminal investigations for “personal acts” that do not involve their conduct in office. You did not identify any such legislative purpose in your initial letter, suggesting that your proposal to “insulate current and former presidents” from state criminal investigations is a baseless pretext to interfere with our Office’s work. Indeed, we doubt that Congress would have authority to place a single private citizen— including a former president or candidate for president—above the law or to grant him unique protections, such as removal to federal court, that are unavailable to every other criminal defendant. “[E]very President takes office knowing that he will be subject to the same laws as all other citizens upon leaving office. This is a feature of our democratic republic, not a bug.” Comm. on Ways and Means v. U.S. Dep’t of Treasury, 45 F.4th 324, 338 (D.C. Cir. 2022).

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The letter concludes by expressing the hope that the committees will “make a good-faith effort to reach a negotiated resolution before taking the unprecedented and unconstitutional step of serving a subpoena on a district attorney for information related to an ongoing state criminal prosecution” and refrain from spewing further inflammatory rhetoric.

Don’t hold your breath.

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Inside the backchannel communications keeping Donald Trump in the loop on Republican investigations [CNN]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

Topics

Alvin Bragg, Courts, Crime, Donald Trump, Government, Leslie Dubeck