Democrats pick New York Rep. Dan Goldman to oppose Republicans at Alvin Bragg hearing

Members of the Judiciary Committee bring in their New Yorker colleagues for Monday’s high-profile crime hearing.

Republicans, led by Chairman Jim Jordan, have waived Conference Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik on their panel for the field hearing designed to take down Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York City crime policy.

Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman will be cleared by his peers to join the panel, a source familiar with the committee’s plans told DailyMail.com. His Manhattan-Brooklyn neighborhood includes the Javitz Federal Building, where the panel will hear testimony Monday at 10 a.m.

Goldman, multimillionaire heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and lead attorney in Trump’s first impeachment, will join a Democrat panel seeking to cast GOP attacks on Bragg as politically motivated interference in a criminal investigation and a way to water Trump. to give. Bragg last week indicted Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records.

“President Jordan is not welcome in my district because of this political stunt that is simply a further waste of taxpayers’ money to support Donald Trump’s legal defense,” Goldman said of the upcoming hearing.

Stefanik will join a team of judicial Republicans hungry to cast Bragg as a George Soros-backed liberal prosecutor focused more on taking down Trump than crime in his backyard.

The congresswoman represents a district hours north of New York City, but is the only member of the House GOP leadership from New York State.

“I look forward to holding Democrats accountable for their failure to prosecute crimes and instead participating in illegal political witch hunts against their political opponents,” Stefanik said of joining the committee.

Goldman was leading counsel for the House Democrats when they impeached Trump after his phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in which he withheld Congressional-approved military aid while pressuring the leader to open an investigation into then-opponent of Trump, President Joe Biden.

He made prosecuting Trump central to his congressional campaign, saying in a TV interview after announcing his candidacy, “I’m running for Congress and this new 10th district because I want to get on the front lines and back in the trenches like I . did during the impeachment.”

The ties of Bragg and Goldman, both prosecutors, are deep-rooted — they’ve both long been active in the city’s criminal justice space. Republicans say they share the same lenient crime policy.

Goldman voted against a resolution of censure for the D.C. crime bill that President Biden later signed into law in 2022 advocated more and more social workers and mental health professionals are responding to domestic violence disputes instead of police officers.

In 2021 he endorsed ‘friend and old’ [Southern District of New York] colleagues Bragg for the district attorney’s job and donated $7,500 to his campaign. The 47-year-old father of five organized a fundraiser for Bragg at his multimillion-dollar Tribeca home.

Bragg’s former campaign adviser and top government aide, Ritchie Fife, also consulted Goldman’s campaign. Rei Ma, Bragg’s campaign finance director, became Goldman’s campaign finance director 5 months later.

Bragg and Goldman organized a fundraiser together in April 2021 to discuss ‘Donald Trump and what’s at stake for the next #ManhattanDA’.

In 2022, when he ran for the 10th district seat, he said he “feels what everyone else feels when he’s afraid to get on the subway and take kids to school.”

In 2021, he admitted that New York City is experiencing a “rampant” and “creepy” crime spree.

“You have people who get shot at random on the subways. You have people who are randomly thrown in the trunks of cars,” he said on the Mary Trump Show hosted by Donald Trump’s niece.

But in 2022, he flipped out over the issue of New York City’s controversial bail reform.

In a debate in August 2022, he said, “We can’t allow people to just keep cycling through the system because it demoralizes the police and gives everyone a perception of danger.”

The city’s 2019 overhaul made most felonies and non-violent crimes ineligible for bail.

Days after the August 2022 debate, Goldman said he disagreed with cash bail.

“I don’t agree with the basic premise of [cash] bail, which means people are not allowed to stay in jail because they can’t pay the bail,” the said the then candidate.

“Whether or not the data says it’s safe or not, there’s a perception in the city that it’s not safe,” he said, when asked about bail reform. “And one of the reasons for that is the ongoing recidivism that’s going on.”

The congressman, who as a prosecutor said in an interview on June 10 that he would “knowledgeably reduce crime in the city,” also has advocated ‘removing non-violent offenders from the system’.

Goldman has long advocated making the justice system “fairer” and reducing incarceration rates.

He advocates Close Rikers Island prison and in law school wrote a article for the Stanford Law Review titled “The Modern-Day Literacy Test?: Felon Disenfranchisement and Race Discrimination,” in which he seemed to suggest that felons should be given the right to vote.

While studying law, Goldman also worked on a book with Michelle Alexander titled “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”

Meanwhile, from the start of 2022 when he took office to November of this year, Bragg has downgraded 52 percent of felonies to felonies. When he took a case, his office won a conviction in only 51 percent of cases — a low figure compared to the district attorney’s office in recent years.

Earlier this week, Bragg sued Jordan on Tuesday in a notable move designed to prevent him from interfering in Trump’s indictment.

The lawsuit charged Jordan with a “brutal and unconstitutional attack” on Trump’s prosecution after the commission subpoenaed Bragg’s former employee, demanded documents and scheduled a field hearing in New York City to discredit his office.

The 50-page lawsuit said Jordan launched a “transparent campaign to intimidate and attack Bragg” after he revealed 34 felonies against Trump over hush money payments last week.

Bragg lawyers are trying to prevent Jordan’s subpoena from Mark Pomerantz, who formerly led the firm’s investigation into Trump before stepping down after Bragg rejected his legal theories, according to the New York Times. He later wrote a book about the need to prosecute Trump.

Bragg, who campaigned for criminal justice reform, released a controversial “Day One” memo after taking office in which he stated that he would only seek jail time in the most serious cases.

In February 2022, Bragg backtracked on his policy a bit, sending a memo making it clear to all his associates that any crime involving a firearm would be prosecuted as a misdemeanor – contradicting the position he had made a month earlier taken.

Bragg’s office also took heat when he attempted to prosecute 61-year-old bodega employee Jose Alba for fatally stabbing a man who attacked him with a bag of chips. Bragg later dropped the charges against Alba.

Crime in New York City increased in 2020 and 2021 during the pandemic (before Bragg took office) following a decade-long, largely downward trend. Serious crime rose about 22 percent by 2022 — with Bragg taking office on the first day of that year.

New York recorded 438 homicides in 2022 – up from 319 in 2019 before the pandemic. Robberies were up 43 percent in 2022 compared to 2019 and crimes were up 32 percent.

From April 2022 to April 2023, major crime remains about the same, although homicides, shootings, and burglaries have fallen.

The city was much safer even in 2022 than during a dangerous period in the 1980s and 1990s — murders and robberies were down 80 percent from 1990 by 2022, and rapes were down 50 percent.