Clown Car Politics 🤡 🚙

https://t.co/8r47C0rdPy pic.twitter.com/dTmZpnEe9K

— Alvin Bragg (@ManhattanDA) March 25, 2023

Jordan’s letter is here. It makes a number of thunderous claims, but leaves something crucial out.

This is what the Committee threatens as a consequence of Bragg’s noncompliance:

Likewise, because the federal government has a compelling interest in protecting the physical safety of former or current Presidents, any decision to prosecute a former or current President raises difficult questions concerning how to vindicate that interest in the context of a state or local criminal justice system. For these reasons and others, we believe that we now must consider whether Congress should take legislative action to protect former and/or current Presidents from politically motivated prosecutions by state and local officials, and if so, how those protections should be structured. Critically, due to your own actions, you are now in possession of information critical to this inquiry.

Most of the letter is just arguing to the gallery (sounds good, means nothing). The threat is to pass legislation that the current Senate will never so much as consider, nor will Biden sign. And the argument for this is in the sentence preceding that one:

For example, a President could choose to avoid taking action he believes to be in the national interest because it would negatively impact New York City for fear that he would be subject to a retaliatory prosecution in New York City.

So a Presidential candidate might decline to pay off a porn star he screwed so she wouldn’t go public with the story before the election because he “would be subject to retaliatory prosecution in New York City”? And that would actually be in the national interest because?

Is he serious?

What’s missing here is any threat to subpoena Bragg. The roundabout threat of legislation is laughable, since the only President it could apply to is Biden (aside from the unremarkable fact this case rests on actions Trump took before he was POTUS, so Jordan’s presumptive law is inapplicable.). Nor could it ever become law, as I said (and Jordan knows). So why no mention of a subpoena?

Because Jordan knows he has little chance of getting it, and no chance of enforcing it. He doesn’t want to take the weak-ass legal theories contained in this letter before a D.C. judge who actually has a functioning brain.  He’s seen the D.C. trial court and Circuit Court in action recently. He knows he doesn’t have a prayer (legal joke).*

If he can’t scare Bragg into compliance, he can’t get compliance. Which is fine with him. He’d rather chase the car than catch it, anyway.

*The conclusion of a legal pleading seeking relief is called the “prayer.”