The House GOP’s Efforts To Obstruct, Obfuscate, Politicize, & Interfere In The Trump Investigations
Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | March 23 , 2023
With the support of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, extremist House Republicans are out to defend former President Donald Trump without regard for any criminal activities in which Trump may have engaged.
These Trump followers show little interest in defending him on the merits in the four criminal investigations he currently faces.
Thus, three Republican House Committee Chairs sent a letter this week to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg accusing him of making a politically motivated prosecutorial decision in the criminal investigation into the hush-money payment Trump made to Stormy Daniels in the closing days of the 2016 election.
The letter from Reps. Jim Jordan, Bryan Steil, and James Comer demanded Bragg turn over various documents and materials in connection with the ongoing investigation and called on Bragg to testify on the case before the House.
As noted in a new MSNBC article, which I co-authored, Congress cannot lawfully use its investigative power to engage in law enforcement. This principle is confirmed by a Supreme Court decision that found there is a “fundamental policy against federal interference with state criminal prosecutions.”
I doubt any federal, state, or local law enforcement official would turn over materials to Congress relevant to a criminal case that they are in the middle of investigating or prosecuting.
And the three House Members undoubtedly did not expect to get any relevant materials or evidence. Instead their apparent intent was to obstruct, obfuscate, politicize, and interfere with a state investigation over which they have no jurisdiction.
Today, Bragg’s office shot back a letter to the three Republicans making clear Bragg has no intention to respond to their demands, calling their effort an “unprecedented inquiry into a pending local prosecution,” and stating that the request “treads into territory very clearly reserved to the states.”
More evidence of the blind support that House Republicans are giving to Trump can be seen in the ludicrous comments this week from Rep. Elise Stefanik, a member of the House Republican leadership.
Stefanik described the Bragg investigation as “the epitome of the weaponizing of the federal government against Democrats’ political opponents.”
That statement is steeped in unreality as the Manhattan DA’s investigation and possible indictment of Trump is a purely local New York matter and has nothing to do with the federal government.
Meanwhile, as House Republicans sought to improperly, if not, illegally, interfere with a local investigation in New York, an ominous development occurred for former President Trump in another investigation.
It happened in the Justice Department special counsel investigation into Trump’s improper possession of classified and top-secret documents that he took from the White House and refused to return to the government over an extended period.
One of Trump’s lawyers who drafted a certification that all documents had been returned when that was not true lost his right to claim attorney-client privilege in an effort to avoid testifying before the grand jury.
Federal district court chief judge Beryl Howell found that an exception to the lawyer-client privilege applied in this case and ordered him to testify. The judge found, sources told ABC News, that the special counsel prosecutors had presented compelling preliminary evidence that Trump “knowingly and deliberately misled his own attorneys about his retention of classified materials after leaving office.”
Judge Howell further found, according to the sources, that the special counsel’s office “had made a ‘prima facie showing that the former president had committed criminal violations” and therefore the attorney-client privilege did not apply.
The $64,000 question is this: Did Trump obstruct justice by telling his attorney that all classified and top-secret documents had been returned to the government, and if so, will the attorney testify to that before the grand jury?
If that happens it would appear that Trump is in deep trouble in this case.
As the Trump criminal investigations unfold, House Republicans are likely to continue making improper demands on prosecutors – extending their activities to the other criminal investigations currently taking place in Georgia and at the Justice Department.
But they can expect to receive the same response that Manhattan DA Bragg gave them today in response to their efforts to intervene in his investigation. The answer was no – and rightly so.
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Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s and other recent newsletters here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
