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Last month, when Donald Trump was indicted in New York City, the House Republican Conference was already in a state of predictable disarray. To secure his job as Speaker, Kevin McCarthy had made contradictory promises to the moderate and far-right factions, and the Party’s plans were sputtering. In late January, an extreme immigration and border bill that the Speaker was supposed to bring to the floor was pulled at the last minute, a victory for the moderates. In February, a new House panel led by Jim Jordan, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, held its first hearing on the “weaponization of the federal government,” an ostensible victory for the MAGA crowd, although the members couldn’t agree on a target. Was it the F.B.I. or Big Tech, cancel culture or the Department of Justice? “It was one of the worst hearings I’ve ever heard,” a committee staffer told me. “They brought an ex-F.B.I. guy to testify who left the bureau in 1999.” The oversight committee, which had vowed to investigate everything from Hunter Biden’s laptop to the withdrawal from Afghanistan, was moving too slowly for the true believers and too fast for everyone else. Other chairmen were feeling defensive. “There’s a big difference between oversight where you have expertise and oversight to churn out press releases,” a G.O.P. aide complained to Punchbowl News. On the debt ceiling, arguably the House Republicans’ defining issue, the conference still didn’t have a budget proposal.
A sense of common purpose coalesced around Trump’s arraignment, in New York, on April 4th. The Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, a first-term Democrat, had charged the former President with thirty-four counts of business fraud for allegedly covering up a hush-money payment to a porn star. (Trump has pleaded not guilty.) In New York State, it is a felony to falsify business records in the execution or concealment of a crime; here, Bragg did not specify the crime—it may have consisted of tax fraud, skirting campaign-finance laws, or both—because he wasn’t required to. The technicality of the infraction, he said, was the “bread and butter” of white-collar prosecutions, but it lacked the heft of the charges that Trump could still face elsewhere. In Georgia, he is under investigation for election fraud, while the Justice Department, which has opened a probe into his mishandling of classified documents, is also looking into Trump’s efforts to overturn the election.
The finer points of the law were immaterial to the leadership of the G.O.P.’s most prominent House committees. Jordan and James Comer, who heads the oversight committee, had moved to counter Bragg before the indictment was even announced. Responding to a post that Trump published on Truth Social, in which he inaccurately predicted the timing of his own arrest, Jordan, Comer, and a third committee chair wrote a letter to Bragg demanding that the District Attorney’s office provide testimony, communications, and documents about its Trump investigation. “You are reportedly about to engage in an unprecedented abuse of prosecutorial authority,” they told him. Bragg, Republican leaders went on to say, would have to come to the Hill to provide “a good argument” for indicting Trump; they planned to “hold [him] . . . to account.”
Once the indictment was unsealed, Jordan subpoenaed Mark Pomerantz, a former federal prosecutor who had investigated Trump in Bragg’s office but resigned last year. Going after Pomerantz may have reflected a subtle shift in approach. Jordan, who had refused to testify after being subpoenaed by the January 6th committee, seemed to recognize that it would be impossible to force Bragg to turn over materials. “Jordan is a MAGA animal, but he is surrounded by people who went to law school,” the committee staffer told me. Bragg sued to block the subpoena and to prevent congressional Republicans from interfering in the case, and a federal judge scheduled a hearing for Wednesday. In the meantime, on Monday morning, while McCarthy was giving a speech at the New York Stock Exchange to allay concerns about the impending debt-ceiling fight, Jordan brought the fight to Bragg by holding a field hearing about crime in New York City.
At 9 A.M., in a drab conference room at a federal building in lower Manhattan, eight witnesses sat in a row across from Jordan and his Democratic counterpart, Jerrold Nadler. Six of them were called by the Republicans, two by the Democrats. Their profiles made the plotlines of the hearing clear before the testimony began. Most of the witnesses on the Republican side had been touched by crime, including a bodega clerk named Jose Alba, who, after being attacked in his store, stabbed an assailant in self-defense, and Madeline Brame, whose son was murdered in Harlem in 2018. “Today’s hearing is about the administration of justice and keeping communities safe,” Jordan said. Bragg, whom he called “soft on crime,” had advanced a “radical political agenda” from his first days in office, signing a memo directing prosecutors to limit charges in certain cases. “The police do their job, they do the hard work, they go out on the streets, they catch the bad guys,” Jordan said, “then D.A.s don’t do their job. Instead, they let bad guys roam the streets.”
The Democrats’ witnesses—Jim Kessler, from the think tank Third Way, and Rebecca Fischer, the executive director of New Yorkers Against Gun Violence—spoke about gun crimes and the relative safety of New York compared with other American cities. Kessler cited a report called “The Red State Murder Problem,” while Fischer pointed out that more than seventy per cent of the “crime guns” used in New York came from out of state. The aim of calling them to testify was to highlight Republican hypocrisy. How could you claim to care about crime while being indifferent to gun violence? “We all grieve for the victims of violent crime, here in Manhattan and everywhere, but it is shameful that the Republicans on this Committee would use the pretext of violent crime as an excuse to play tourist in New York,” Nadler said. The day’s hearing, he added, was “cynical, unethical, and . . . just plain dangerous.”
To watch the proceedings was to float between two parallel universes. The Democrats talked about guns and Trump, sketching a map of America in which it was more dangerous to live in red states because of the widespread availability of weaponry. The Republicans had their own map of the menace of blue America: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago. Their bêtes noires were progressive prosecutors. “Your public safety as a resident is dramatically impacted by your district attorney and whether he or she is a Soros rogue prosecutor or a law-and-order prosecutor,” Mike Johnson, the Republican from Louisiana, said. (He was quoting a report from the Heritage Foundation titled “The Blue City Murder Problem.”) He has a crisp, lawyerly style that belies his insurrectionary politics. Bragg, he said, is “probably the worst offender.” It was a point echoed by Matt Gaetz, from Florida, who, in his brasher mode, used his time to complain about the “Soros-ization of the United States Justice System.”
Field hearings aren’t new or inherently partisan. What was different this time was that Jordan was using the forum to stage a political attack. On Monday, the Republicans tried to deny this. They were as careful not to mention Trump as the Democrats were eager to name-check him. But, in February, according to the Times, one of Trump’s lawyers wrote Jordan a note demanding that Congress investigate the “egregious abuse of power” by a “rogue local district attorney.” Jordan’s subsequent letters to Bragg, coupled with the subpoena of Pomerantz, were aimed at disrupting the D.A.’s investigation through a combination of intimidation and harassment. “Chairman Jordan claims he is seeking to conduct ‘oversight,’ ” Bragg’s lawyers wrote in their lawsuit. “But he has no power under the Constitution to oversee state and local criminal matters. By definition, then, he has no legitimate legislative purpose for issuing this subpoena.”
No one in Washington expects anything substantive to come of these field hearings. But to consider them a distraction is to miss the Republican majority’s new M.O. There’s not enough unity in the conference to pass anything out of the House, so the marquee committees are touring the country to launch a permanent campaign against Biden and the Democrats. This year, the Judiciary Committee’s budget, under Jim Jordan, is reportedly nineteen million dollars, up from $7.6 million a year ago. According to the Judiciary Committee’s budget calculations, it spent a total of eight thousand dollars on travel in 2022; its projected travel budget for 2023 is two hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars. Some Democrats on the committee told me that they found out about Monday’s field hearing at the same time as the general public. Last week, Adam Schiff told me, “There’s a danger we come to be numbed by the relentless assaults on the rule of law. What Jordan is saying with this hearing is that Trump is above the law. The relentlessness of the assault numbs us to the outrageousness of it.” ♦
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