House Speaker Kevin McCarthy continued his condemnation of politicized justice by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg just minutes after Donald Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to be indicted Thursday night.
"Alvin Bragg has irreparably damaged our country in an attempt to interfere in our presidential election," McCarthy tweeted minutes after the news broke.
"As he routinely frees violent criminals to terrorize the public, he weaponized our sacred system of justice against President Donald Trump.
"The American people will not tolerate this injustice, and the House of Representatives will hold Alvin Bragg and his unprecedented abuse of power to account."
House Republican committee chairmen Reps. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, James Comer, R-Ky., and Bryan Steil, R-Wis., have given Bragg a deadline to respond to their inquiries into his searching for a crime to charge the leader of the political opposition with.
Bragg responded with a terse warning to stop the "incursion" into New York's sovereignty, saying it is a local law enforcement matter that does not warrant congressional oversight.
The Republicans responded with a multipage letter last weekend detailing how Bragg's grand jury case is under their authority for oversight.
The Democrat Bragg, 49, is the first prosecutor in U.S. history to charge a former or sitting president, and the first Black Manhattan DA, winning election to the post in November 2021.
A New York grand jury's indictment of Trump on Thursday over hush money paid to pornographic actress Stormy Daniels has put Bragg firmly in the national spotlight and drawn the ire of conservatives across the United States.
The Democrat ran for DA as a progressive candidate, pledging to seek alternatives to imprisonment and to increase prosecutions of white-collar financial crimes.
"The Democrats have lied, cheated and stolen in their obsession with trying to 'get Trump,' but now they've done the unthinkable — indicting a completely innocent person in an act of blatant election interference," Trump wrote in his statement Thursday night.
Just days after taking office in January last year, Bragg announced he would no longer prosecute low-level offenses, such as fare evasion and resisting arrest. He also said he would seek lesser offenses for certain robberies and avoid seeking jail time for all but the most serious crimes.
By February, Bragg had been forced to revise the policy following a backlash from the NYPD and criticism from Democrat Mayor Eric Adams, who had pledged to crack down on violent crime.
Bragg also received early flak for perceived hesitance in the Trump probe he inherited from his predecessor Cyrus Vance, who started it in 2018.
Two lead prosecutors quit the investigation into Trump's business dealings in February 2022, throwing the future of the inquiry into doubt.
The New York Times reported the pair had resigned after Bragg raised doubts about pursuing a case against Trump.
While the DA's office would only say in a statement that the case was ongoing, in the background, it was honing in on the $130,000 payment made to Daniels in 2016.
In December, Bragg secured the convictions of the Trump organization and another Trump entity over a years-long scheme to defraud and evade taxes through the falsification of business records.
Longtime Trump organization CFO Allen Weisselberg was sentenced to five months in prison and agreed to pay $2 million in fines for his role in the scam.
Trump was not charged over the case.
That is said to have given Bragg the confidence to form a grand jury to begin hearing evidence in the hush-money probe.
The former president has repeatedly lashed out at Bragg, calling him a "racist" and a "radical left" district attorney.
Information from Agence France-Presse was used in this report.
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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