Ex-con fighting to return to Congress

NEW YORK — Michael Grimm doesn’t want to talk about his time in prison. He just wants your vote.

The former Republican congressman from New York City’s Staten Island is fighting his party, his president and the stigma of a felony conviction in a no-holds-barred primary June 26.

Just two years out of prison, the amateur boxer with a fiery temper wants his old job back. And he has a legitimate chance to seize the nomination from the incumbent, Dan Donovan.

Just don’t ask Grimm about his time behind bars for tax fraud.

“I’m done talking about it,” Grimm said in a recent Associated Press interview, blaming his seven-month stay in a federal prison on a politically motivated Justice Department under President Barack Obama’s administration. “It’s a closed chapter in my life. I’m looking to the future.”

President Donald Trump spotlighted the race last week with a Twitter endorsement of Donovan, warning that a Grimm primary victory would risk losing the GOP’s only U.S. House seat in the city.

“Remember Alabama,” Trump wrote, likening Grimm to Republican Roy Moore, the Alabama Senate candidate who was accused of molesting teenage girls and who lost the general election to a Democrat in the GOP stronghold.

Trump’s decision to step into New York’s turbulent GOP primary tests the strength of his influence in his hometown’s only conservative pocket. The 11th Congressional District covers the quiet streets of Staten Island as well as a slice of southern Brooklyn.

It is home to many white working-class voters — police officers, firefighters and hairdressers — who have sent a Republican to Washington for most of the past decade.

Donovan, a 61-year-old former public prosecutor, isn’t shy about highlighting Grimm’s criminal history.

“Once you betray the community, you don’t get a second chance,” Donovan told the AP as he toured the district last week. “This race comes down to integrity: Who can the public trust?”

Grimm, 48, is a former Marine and FBI agent who represented the area from 2011 to 2015.

He survived a political firestorm in 2014 after his violent threat against a reporter on Capitol Hill was caught on video. A year later, Grimm was forced to resign after pleading guilty to felony tax fraud involving a restaurant he partially owned before going to Congress.

In an interview, Grimm suggested that Donovan dangled the possibility of a presidential pardon should he abandon his primary challenge. A Donovan spokesman denied the claim.

A spokesman for Trump, who pardoned one conservative supporter last week and is contemplating other pardons, did not respond to questions about a possible pardon for Grimm.

Does Grimm want a pardon?

“Of course! I don’t know of anyone who wouldn’t, especially in my circumstances,” Grimm told the AP.