In defense of Trump, House GOP targets Bragg with hearing on N.Y. crime

NEW YORK — House Republicans and a parade of Republican-picked witnesses assailed Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as being soft on violent crime at a hearing here Monday designed to undercut the prosecutor in pressing charges against former president Donald Trump related to hush money payments to an adult-film actress.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), a staunch Trump ally, opened the four-hour hearing with a broadside against Bragg, claiming he is more interested in pursuing a “radical political agenda” than upholding the law.

“He’s taken his soft-on-crime approach to the real criminals,” Jordan said, previewing a line of attack that Republicans on the panel would recite repeatedly. One of them called on Bragg to resign and argued he should be disbarred.

Even before it began, Democrats branded the hearing as a political stunt at odds with reality. Bragg has described New York as “the safest big city in America” — and one that on a per capita basis compares favorably with the largest city in Jordan’s district.

“This hearing is being called for one reason and one reason only: to protect Donald Trump,” Rep. Jerrold Nadler (N.Y.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said shortly before the hearing. “Jim Jordan and his Republican accomplices are acting as an extension of the Trump defense team, trying to intimidate and deter the duly elected district attorney of Manhattan. … That is an outrageous abuse of power.”

Jordan, seeking to sully Bragg’s reputation and bolster his contention that the prosecutor’s priorities are misplaced, presented a series of witnesses who have been victims of crime and carry grievances against Bragg.

Jose Alba, a former Manhattan bodega clerk, testified first, recounting that he was arrested and charged by Bragg’s office with second-degree murder after fatally stabbing an assailant inside his shop in Harlem. Prosecutors later dropped the charges, but Alba said the episode upended his life.

“Even though the charges were ultimately dropped, they should not have been brought against me to begin with,” Alba said, through a statement read by his attorney. “I am now traumatized from the incident. I am not working because I’m terrified for my life that someone in the gang will come after me for revenge.”

Others testifying included tough-on-crime activists who have appeared on conservative media, as well as Robert F. Holden, a Democrat on the New York City Council who has been critical of Bragg’s policies.

Holden told the panel that “lawlessness” has “taken over this city in recent years as a result of the failed progressive policies implemented by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.”

Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), who thanked the witnesses for testifying, told them, “I fear that you are being used for a political purpose despite your sincerity.”

During the hearing, several of the GOP witnesses elicited applause as they criticized Bragg, while outside the room protesters targeted Jordan, who voted to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election. Protesters held signs that read, “Jim Jordan Assaulted Democracy,” “Jim Jordan Insurrectionist” and “Indict Jim Jordan.”

At one point in the hearing, two audience members were ejected for standing up and shouting.

Bragg was not called to testify, and New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) said he was not invited, either.

Ahead of the hearing, Adams and Nadler, whose district includes part of Manhattan, assailed Jordan for what they characterized as a waste of taxpayer resources.

Adams called the hearing “really troubling,” saying Jordan was leading a “junket to do an examination of the safest big city in America.” Adams said lawmakers should focus on the proliferation of guns coming into New York from elsewhere, an issue he said Republicans have failed to address.

That point was also stressed during the hearing by one of the Democratic witnesses, Rebecca Fischer, executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence.

She said that New York ranks 47th out of the 50 states in gun violence.

“But New Yorkers are still being killed and injured by shootings each year,” she said. “And that is because of the national gun trafficking crisis. The national gun trafficking crisis is largely the result of weak gun laws in other states and the fact that Congress has not enacted federal gun violence prevention reforms.”

The hearing included claims and counterclaims about the nuanced state of crime in Manhattan.

Crime in New York has increased since the pandemic — though it remains far below 1980s levels — and city statistics show that of the seven severe categories of crime, five are down relative to this point in 2022.

In a tweet last week, Bragg said that compared with a year ago, murders in Manhattan were down 14 percent, while shootings were down 17, burglaries were down 21 percent and robberies were down 18 percent.

One of the Democratic witnesses, Jim Kessler, senior vice president for policy at the think tank Third Way, said horrible crime does occur in New York, “a massive city of 8.5 million people piled atop each other on a speck of land, barely 300 square miles in size.”

But, he said, “the fact is that New York City is not only safer than most large cities in America, it is safer than most cities of any size. And on a per capita basis, New York City is safer than most of the states of the members sitting on the dais.”

Several Democrats noted during the hearing that some cities in Ohio, Jordan’s home state, are among those with higher crime per capita rates than New York.

At one point, Rep. David N. Cicilline (D-R.I.) suggested moving the hearing from New York to Ohio.

“This hearing was called for a purpose: to intimidate the district attorney for doing his job and upholding the ruling of law,” Cicilline said.

Some of the GOP witnesses argued Monday that Bragg has been too willing to cut lenient plea deals for perpetrators of violent crime.

They included Madeline Brame, who became an advocate for crime victims after her son, 35-year-old son Hason Correa, an Afghanistan war veteran and married father of three children, was fatally stabbed during a gang assault in 2018.

Brame said Bragg inherited the case from his predecessor, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., and that four individuals had already been indicted by then for murder and gang assault.

“As soon as [Bragg] took office, the case immediately began to unravel,” Brame claimed.

Two of the four people arrested in the case were sentenced to 20 years to life after a guilty plea and a trial conviction. A third man received a seven-year sentence as part of a plea deal, and a woman in the group got what amounted to time served, 14 months.

A memo filed by Bragg’s office when the plea offers were made described mitigating factors related to the two who got breaks. The woman who got time served, for example, may not have known her brother stabbed Correa nine times during the scuffle when she participated in the assault, the memo said.

Jordan and Bragg have been involved in an escalating fight over Jordan’s attempts to intervene in the case against Trump. Even before Trump was charged, Jordan demanded materials related to the district attorney’s investigation into the hush money payments — demands that Bragg’s office rebuffed.

Last week, after Jordan persisted by trying to subpoena a former Bragg associate, Bragg filed a federal lawsuit decrying what the prosecutor said was a “brazen and unconstitutional attack” by members of Congress on his criminal prosecution of Trump.

Ahead of Monday’s hearing, lawyers for Jordan responded to Bragg’s suit in a legal filing in which they argued the Judiciary Committee’s scrutiny of the case is legitimate because Congress has an interest in the welfare of former presidents.

“The Committee is considering legislation that would expressly allow current and former Presidents and Vice Presidents to remove any criminal actions against them from state to federal court,” the filing said.

Jordan has repeatedly insisted that no crime was committed by Trump, who pleaded not guilty to 34 charges of falsifying business records to conceal payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels.

Jordan’s demands of Bragg’s office have drawn sharp criticism from Democrats, who pointed out that the right-wing lawmaker ignored a subpoena from the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. The Jan. 6 committee later voted to refer Jordan and other GOP lawmakers who had also defied its subpoenas to the House Ethics Committee.

In one of his last acts as president, Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom — the nation’s highest civilian award — to Jordan in January 2021. The White House at the time praised Jordan, one of eight House lawmakers who were part of Trump’s defense team in his first Senate impeachment trial, for his work to “unmask the Russia hoax and take on Deep State corruption” and for his efforts to “confront the impeachment witch hunt.”