A Republican lawmaker is considering ways to hold prosecutors who abuse their powers to greater legal liability, including ending blanket legal immunity from lawsuits for misconduct.
Republican lawmakers in the House of Representatives have been floating a number of ways to ensure professional conduct by prosecutors, days after former President Donald Trump revealed he would likely be prosecuted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whom critics accuse of using the justice system to target political opponents and Trump linked to donations from Democratic party megadonor George Soros. Some Republican lawmakers called for Bragg to testify before Congress, raising the possibility of blocking politicized prosecutors from receiving federal funds.
Trump has since been indicted.
In a new interview with Just The News, Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) said that Republicans are now also considering altering the qualified immunity rules that protect prosecutors from being sued for misconduct.
“I think you’re going to have to look at prosecutorial misconduct and whether or not prosecutors in this country should be exempt from liability,” Scott said.
The indictment against the former president remains sealed. But it comes after Bragg’s office had been looking into Trump’s alleged involvement in a $130,000 payment in 2016 to adult entertainment actress Stormy Daniels by his lawyer at the time, Michael Cohen. The payment was allegedly made to stop Daniels from going public with her claim of an affair with Trump before the 2016 election. Trump denies the alleged affair and directing the payment.
Bragg’s office may argue the payment should have been classified as a campaign expense but was wrongly classified as a business expense by the Trump Organization—in violation of Section 175 of New York law—which ranks the falsification of business records as a Class E felony. The DOJ had already declined to prosecute the 2016 payment to Daniels as an election law violation.
Scott decried Bragg’s potential case against Trump, which may stem from a years-old allegation that federal prosecutors already declined.
“The thing that separates America from other countries is the government does not have the right to hunt an American citizen,” Scott said. “Whether you like him or not the government does not have the right to hunt Donald Trump to hunt the Trump organization to hunt his family.”
Qualified immunity became a topic of debate in the summer of 2020, amid discussions on police reform following the death of George Floyd. Qualified immunity is a legal principle that protects government officials from civil liability for discretionary actions they may take that could violate a person’s civil rights in most case. Some police reform efforts sought to remove or modify qualified immunity protections for police officers after Floyd died while in the custody of Minneapolis Police Officers.
“These left-wing, liberal prosecutors and George Soros prosecutors want to take away immunity from police officers, yet they want to maintain it for themselves. I guarantee you if this prosecutor did not have immunity for his actions, he would not have filed this against Donald Trump,” Scott told Just The News.
“So maybe we need to be looking at how a prosecutor who abuses his power the way this Manhattan district attorney has done becomes personally liable and potentially criminally chargeable for their actions,” he alleged.
States Adding Oversight Against Prosecutors
An aide for Scott told NTD that the federal representative’s office is not currently preparing legislation impacting qualified immunity for prosecutors.
Scott noted that lawmakers in his state, along with altering qualified immunity for prosecutors, recently passed legislation that would establish a new board to review and potentially remove local prosecutors from office for “willful misconduct in office,” or “willful and persistent failure to carry out duties.” Democratic critics of that bill said it could undermine prosecutorial discretion.
Last year, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis suspended Florida State Attorney Andrew Warren for allegedly refusing to enforce the state’s laws restricting abortion. In January, a federal judge ruled that Warren had the right to exercise prosecutorial discretion in cases involving abortion laws, but the judge also said he lacked the authority to reinstate Warren.
In February, Republican Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey initiated an effort to fire Democrat St. Louis District Attorney Kimberly Gardner after a motorist facing prior charges ran over a teenage volleyball player who had to have both legs amputated as a result of the crash. Bailey argued that the motorist in that case, Daniel Riley, had racked up numerous bond violations after he was previously arrested for first-degree robbery and armed criminal action. According to Bailey, Gardner allowed Riley to remain out of pretrial detention despite his numerous alleged bond violations.
Bailey called for Gardner’s resignation and then fired her over her alleged inaction that allowed Riley to be out on a bond on the day he struck the teenager with a vehicle. Gardner has called Bailey’s reasoning “baseless” and has vowed to fight the effort to remove her from office.
Bragg, Democrats Push Back on GOP
Bragg and some Democratic lawmakers have defended his decision to charge Trump and accused Republican critics of interfering with a legally valid prosecution.
After Republican lawmakers called for Bragg to testify before Congress about his case, the legal counsel for Bragg’s office, Lesli Dubeck, said such oversight efforts “would interfere with law enforcement” and said a “congressional review of a pending criminal investigation usurps executive powers.”
Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee criticized the efforts of his Republican counterparts for seeking to compel Bragg’s testimony before congress.
“Using a congressional committee to bully a state DA sounds like … the weaponization of the federal government,” Nadler said March 20 on Twitter.
After Bragg’s office announced his decision to indict Trump, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the grand jury who approved the indictment “acted upon the facts and the law,” before suggesting that Trump now has the chance to “prove” his “innocence.”
She faced significant criticism for her comment, to the point where viewers on Twitter were able to append a note to the post and link a Cornell Law School webpage explaining the presumption of innocence in the United States.
“Ms. Pelosi mistakenly says that Trump can prove his innocence at trial,” the note states. “Law in the US assumes the innocence of a defendant and the prosecution must prove guilt for a conviction.”