Global Courant 2023-04-12 01:55:53
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who is prosecuting former President Donald Trump in a case related to hush money payments to a pornographic actress, has sued a Republican lawmaker investigating his investigation.
In the lawsuit filed Tuesday, Bragg accused Representative Jim Jordan, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, of a “transparent campaign to intimidate and assault” him after the New York District Attorney indicted Trump on 34 felony counts of falsifying business documents.
The lawsuit — the latest salvo in a back-and-forth between Democratic prosecutors and Republican lawmakers — asked a judge to invalidate subpoenas Jordan has issued or plans to file as part of an investigation into Bragg’s handling of the case .
In the lawsuit, Bragg said he is taking legal action “in response to an unprecedentedly brutal and unconstitutional attack by members of Congress on an ongoing criminal prosecution and investigation of former President Donald J Trump in New York State.”
“Congress has no valid legislative purpose to engage in a free-running campaign of harassment in retaliation for the prosecutor’s investigation and prosecution of Mr. Trump under the laws of New York,” the lawsuit said.
It added that Congress has no constitutional authority “to oversee, much less interfere with, the state’s ongoing criminal justice cases.”
The move came as Jordan, who was a staunch Trump ally during the former president’s term, has issued a deluge of letters and subpoenas to individuals involved in the case against Trump, the first president in U.S. history to criminally charged.
One subpoena calls for testimony from former prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, who previously oversaw the Trump investigation. Pomerantz publicly explained how he sparred with Bragg about the probe’s direction before leaving office last year.
House Republicans had previously sent a letter to Bragg demanding he testify about what they called a “politically motivated prosecution decision.”
In response, Bragg accused Republicans of an “unlawful incursion” into his jurisdiction. His office has rejected claims that Trump’s prosecution is politically motivated, calling such claims “baseless”.
Trump and his allies, including Jordan, have continued the narrative that Bragg is a political operative who receives money from liberal super-donor George Soros, a claim Soros has denied.
Jordan responded to Bragg’s lawsuit in a tweet on Tuesday.
“First, they are indicting a president for no crime,” he wrote. “Then they sue to block congressional oversight when we question the federal funds they say they used to.”
Last week, Trump made his first court appearance, facing charges related to a hush money payment made to adult film performer Stormy Daniels through his lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen.
Daniels has said she had an affair with Trump before he became president.
While typically a felony under New York state law, falsifying company records becomes a felony if done with “intent to defraud and intent to commit another crime and assist and abet the commission of it.” hide”.
In a post-indictment press conference, Bragg said Trump had violated both state and federal election laws, as well as mischaracterizing payments to Cohen as being for “tax purposes.”
A fact sheet released along with the indictment accused Trump of carrying out “a plan with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him in order to suppress its publication and increase (Trump’s) electoral prospects”.
Prosecutors will have to prove that Trump falsified the data in the service of a secondary crime, but will not have to prosecute that secondary crime.
Bragg is being represented in Tuesday’s lawsuit against Jordan by Theodore Boutrous, a well-known First Amendment attorney who has also represented Trump’s estranged niece, Mary Trump, in legal clashes with her celebrity uncle.
The case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil, a Trump appointee who previously served as a federal bankruptcy court judge.
The lawsuit came after the House Judiciary Committee announced Monday that it plans to hold a hearing in Manhattan on New York City crime and what it has called Bragg’s “pro-crime, anti-victim” policy.
Bragg’s office in response pointed to statistics showing that violent crime in Manhattan has fallen since he took over the position in January 2022.
In a statement, Bragg called the hearing “a political stunt” and said that if Jordan “really cared about public safety,” he would focus on crime in cities in his home state of Ohio “instead of using taxpayers’ money to drive hundreds of miles to travel”. miles out of his way”.
