James Comer Crashes And Burns As Jake Tapper Blows Holes In His Alvin Bragg Attack

The problem with that is, this is not a local investigation. This is a federal investigation. He’s investigating a presidential candidate, not to mention former president of the United States, for a federal election crime.

That has no business being litigated in a local district attorney’s office.

And when he says he’s not going to cooperate with Congress, unfortunately for Mr. Bragg, he doesn’t have the luxury of determining whether or not he can comply with congressional requests, because he crossed over two levels of government from the local level to the federal level to try to prosecute something that, clearly, if there was a reason for prosecution, it should be done by the Department of Justice on the federal level.

TAPPER: Well, he’s investigating, as I understand it, potential violations of state crimes.

COMER: Even at that, look, let’s just be honest here.

I mean, this is about politics. This is a presidential candidate. When you look at what we believe the role of the Manhattan DA should be is to fight crime. I mean, that’s one of the biggest issues in New York. We saw that in the midterm elections last November.

Voters overwhelmingly rejected many Democrat candidates because of the crime issue. We have a crime crisis in many of our cities. And we’re trying to do something about that in the House of Representatives. And one of the reasons we believe we have high crime rates in certain parts of America is because we have prosecutors that are soft on crime.

And we believe that our tax dollars — and that’s where I come in with the House Oversight — we believe tax dollars would be better spent prosecuting local criminals. That’s what a DA is supposed to do.

TAPPER: Are you arguing that people who commit business crimes are not committing crimes?

COMER: Look, well, is this a business crime? We’re talking about a federal election crime here, Jake. This is a federal election crime.

The Manhattan DA does not write federal electoral law.

COMER: Congress writes federal election law.

TAPPER: My understanding is that he’s being investigated for falsifying business records. It’s — there was a related prosecution. Michael Cohen went to prison. That was a federal investigation from the U.S. attorney during the Trump years.