The GOP Bragg-on slayers
Stefanik: Hearing about crime, not Don
It’s the crime rate, stupid. The House Judiciary Committee is setting its sights on New York because the state is a hotbed of failed left-wing criminal-justice policies, Rep. Elise Stefanik told The Post on Sunday.
New York’s top Republican in Congress fired back at Democrats who claim Monday’s hearing by the GOP-led panel is only payback for Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s prosecution of former President Donald Trump, saying it’s really about the state’s soft-on-crime laws.
“New York is being targeted because you have radical left-wing Democrats who have put failed bail reform in place,” she said.
“That includes [Gov.] Kathy Hochul, that includes legislators in Albany, that includes defund-thepolice Democrats in New York City, as well as radical, far-left district attorneys like Alvin Bragg.”
The upstate representative charged that New York “is the epicenter of the catastrophic crime crisis happening across our country.
“Not just families in New York City, but broadly, even in my district.”
Although she is not on the committee, Stefanik, 38, has been allowed to sit in on the hearing that will convene at the Jacob Javits Federal Building in lower Manhattan to probe Bragg’s lefty policies, as well as rampant crime in the city and the Empire State overall.
Bragg has been under fire since taking office in January 2022 and announcing that his office would not prosecute many nonviolent crimes, and would reduce some felonies to misdemeanors.
Stefanik chided Bragg in particular for “refusing to prosecute heinous crimes, violent crimes.”
“And yet they’re conducting political witch hunts for crimes that have not been committed,” she added, in an apparent reference to the DA’s felony case against Trump.
The “Victims of Violent Crime in Manhattan” committee hearing comes after the indictment of Trump on charges that he falsified business records for “hush money” payments to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal just before the 2016 presidential election.
Nadler on defense
Rep. Jerry Nadler (Manhattan), the committee’s top Democrat, has come out swinging in defense of Bragg, claiming the hearing is part of “the Republicans’ general attempts to obstruct justice and to attack the DA in Manhattan and to obstruct justice in the Trump case.”
But Stefanik maintained that the impetus for the hearing was the state’s lenient 2019 justice reforms and failed crime policies in the Big Apple.
“I think, going back to the effective years with the last Republican mayor, Rudy Giuliani, in terms of being [a] tough-on-crime approach, really cleaned up New York City,” Stefanik said.
“And New York City has backslided since then,” she continued. “So, I give Mayor Adams [a former police officer] a failing grade.
“You know, he has an important law-enforcement background, but New Yorkers continue to flee. New Yorkers continue to fear for their security,” Stefanik said.
Democrats, including on the committee, are “trying to sort of message around this,” she said.
“They want to silence victims,” she said. “They want to silence everyday New Yorkers who are suffering and have lost loved ones because of this crime crisis.”
Among the witnesses scheduled to testify before the committee is José Alba, a Manhattan bodega worker who was initially charged with murder by Bragg’s office after stabbing an assailant in selfdefense, and Joseph Borgen, a Jewish New Yorker who was beaten in an anti-Semitic attack near Times Square.
City Hall spokesman Fabien Levy said the committee was holding “a sham hearing to boost Donald Trump’s campaign” and accused Stefanik of spinning “false tails to prop up Donald Trump’s flailing political career.” The DA’s office didn’t comment.