Brenna Bird and Republican AGs are masters of projection
Talk about a travesty
This post first appeared at Bleeding Heartland and is shared here as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. For regular emails linking to all recent Bleeding Heartland articles and commentary, including more coverage of education, state government and the Iowa legislature’s 2024 session, subscribe to the free Evening Heartland newsletter. If your email provider truncates this post, you can read the whole article without interruption at this link.
“What I saw in that courtroom today is a travesty,” Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird told reporters in New York City on May 13. She was speaking outside the courthouse where former President Donald Trump is being tried for allegedly “falsifying business records to conceal hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election.”
The Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) organized the trip and paid for Bird’s travel to Manhattan, a spokesperson for Bird’s campaign told reporters after the attorney general declined to answer that question directly.
Ed Tibbetts highlighted Bird’s disrespect for the legal system when she declared the case “a scam and a sham.” Dave Busiek ridiculed Bird’s hypocrisy after she denounced the prosecution’s witness Michael Cohen (“a perjurer, disbarred, convicted of lying”) “without any apparent sense of irony that she’s appearing on behalf of Donald Trump, who lies as easily and frequently as the rest of us breathe.”
It’s also worth noting that Trump loyalists like Bird and RAGA have no room to point fingers about political prosecutions or “election interference.”
“POLITICS HAS NO PLACE IN A CRIMINAL PROSECUTION”
In front of the cameras, Bird decried the case against Trump: “Politics has no place in a court of law. Politics should be out on the campaign trail. But instead, because of these charges that are a scam and a sham, he, our President Trump is tied up in court when he should be out on the campaign trail.”
She echoed the talking points minutes later on her social media feeds:
Politics has no place in a criminal prosecution.
I am glad to stand with President Donald J. Trump in NY today in opposition to the lawfare being waged against him.
It is clear that Biden & his far-left allies will stop at nothing to silence President Trump’s voice and keep him off the campaign trail by keeping him tied up in court. It’s wrong, it’s election interference, & our country deserves better.
President Trump, America is in that courtroom with you.
According to Radio Iowa’s O. Kay Henderson, Bird drew applause earlier this month when she told delegates to the Iowa GOP’s state convention,
“Politics has absolutely no place in a prosecution, right? It never should and never has when I prosecuted cases,” Bird said May 4. “We have to protect our court system and our justice system, too, from those kind of overreaches and people who would use it for political purposes.”
This imagined unfair crusade doesn’t match real world happenings. On the contrary: James Romoser documented in an article for Politico last month that Trump has repeatedly received “special treatment”: “Over the past year, in ways large and small, in criminal cases and civil ones, Trump has consistently been given more freedom and more privileges than virtually any other defendant in his shoes.”
More relevant to the topic at hand: Trump already abused his power in order to instigate political prosecutions.
Sometimes it happened out in the open. In early October 2020, the sitting president “mounted an overnight Twitter blitz demanding to jail his political enemies and call out allies he says are failing to arrest his rivals swiftly enough.” Later that month—just two weeks before election day—Trump said in a Fox News interview that U.S. Attorney General William Barr must investigate alleged corruption involving Joe Biden and his son Hunter: “We’ve got to get the attorney general to act […] He’s got to act, and he’s got to act fast.”
Sometimes Trump or his appointees tried to influence prosecutions behind the scenes. Geoffrey S. Berman, whom Trump fired as U.S. attorney in Manhattan in June 2020, wrote at length about such interference in his 2022 book, Holding the Line.
The book paints a picture of Justice Department officials motivated by partisan concerns in pursuing investigations or blocking them; in weighing how forthright to be in court filings; and in shopping investigations to other prosecutors’ offices when the Southern District [of New York] declined to act.
The book contains accounts of how department officials tried to have allusions to Mr. Trump scrubbed from charging papers for Michael D. Cohen, his former personal lawyer, and how the attorney general later tried to have his conviction reversed. It tells of pressure to pursue Mr. Kerry, who had angered Mr. Trump by attempting to preserve the nuclear deal he had negotiated with Iran. […]
Mr. Berman’s book says that during Mr. Trump’s presidency, department officials made “overtly political” demands, choosing targets that would directly further Mr. Trump’s desires for revenge and advantage. Mr. Berman wrote that the pressure was clearly inspired by the president’s openly professed wants.
Barr himself said in a March 2022 interview with NBC’s Lester Holt that Trump “never really had a good idea of, you know, the role of the Department of Justice [and] to some extent, you know, the president’s role.”
As Bird and RAGA leaders should know, Trump has already promised to pursue criminal charges against his opponents if he returns to the White House. He told reporters last June, “I will appoint a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of America, Joe Biden, and go after the Biden crime family.” When conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck asked last August, “Do you regret not locking [Clinton] up? And if you’re president again, will you lock people up?” Trump replied, “The answer is you have no choice, because they’re doing it to us.”
Just a few weeks ago, Trump told a TIME magazine interviewer that “if the Supreme Court did not find presidential immunity applied to Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, then Biden would be ‘prosecuted for all of his crimes, because he’s committed many crimes.'”
Incidentally, Bird signed on to an amicus brief with other Republican attorneys general in March, supporting Trump’s contention that former presidents cannot be prosecuted for any actions they took while in office.
“LET THE AMERICAN PEOPLE DECIDE”
Speaking to reporters outside the courthouse, Bird declared, “Let the American people decide who the next leader of the free world will be.”
If Trump had embraced that core principle of democracy, two of the four criminal cases against him wouldn’t exist.
Trump pressured Justice Department officials to publicize false claims about election fraud and help him overturn the result, for instance by pressuring states to appoint fake electors.
RAGA was deeply involved in efforts to subvert the peaceful transfer of power after Trump lost to Biden. The organization spread misinformation about election irregularities as GOP state attorneys general joined legal efforts to throw out mailed ballots.
A dark money affiliate of RAGA called the Rule of Law Defense Fund helped organize the “March to Save America” rally on January 6 and covered some of the costs. For example, the fund paid for a robocall urging supporters to attend that rally: “We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal.”
If you’ve watched any Trump rally over the past several years, you’ve heard him drone on with elaborate lies about the 2020 election. Bird has personally attended some of these events and has never corrected the record. Two days before the Iowa caucuses, she moderated a “telerally” and responded approvingly (“yeah”) when Trump falsely claimed Arizona was stolen from him in 2020 and asserted we need to “clean up our elections.” Watch, starting around the 40-minute mark:
Trump and his allies have already signaled they won’t accept the 2024 election result if Biden wins a second term. Reporters with access to Bird should keep pressing her for an answer: will she agree to “let the American people decide,” even if they reject her preferred candidate?
BIRD OWES MUCH TO TRUMP—AND RAGA
No one should be surprised that Bird and RAGA are in the tank for Trump. His judicial appointees have often ruled in favor of Republican state attorneys general challenging Biden administration policies. If he is able to appoint more judges, more cases could go their way. He might even select some attorneys general for important roles in his administration or on the federal bench.
Other political considerations may also have influenced Bird’s decision to set aside her Iowa duties for a quick trip to New York. (The attorney general’s spokesperson has not responded to Bleeding Heartland’s questions about whether Bird took May 13 as a vacation day or paid personal day.)
Bird became Trump’s highest-ranking Iowa endorser last October and appeared at several of his rallies before the caucuses. She is viewed as a likely GOP candidate for governor in 2026 if Kim Reynolds doesn’t seek re-election, and she would have the inside track for Trump’s endorsement in a Republican primary. Trump foreshadowed that possibility in his victory speech on Iowa caucus night, saying of Bird, “She’s going to be your governor someday.”
As helpful as Trump could be going forward, Bird has RAGA and its stable of conservative nonprofits and corporate donors to thank for her past success.
The RAGA Action Fund gave $2 million to Bird’s 2022 campaign ($200,000 in May, $1 million in September, and another $800,000 in October). Nearly 60 percent of all funds she raised (about $3.44 million during the 2022 election cycle) came from RAGA.
Donations from RAGA Action Fund allowed Bird to outspend Democratic opponent Tom Miller, a 40-year incumbent. Her campaign dedicated $1.1 million to paid advertising in September and the first half of October, and more than $1.4 million to advertising during the last few weeks of the campaign.
On a big night for many Iowa GOP candidates, Bird defeated Miller by a narrow margin: 20,542 votes out of more than 1.2 million cast (50.8 percent to 49.1 percent). RAGA’s $2 million was arguably the decisive factor in that race.
Talk about a travesty.
For other takes on Brenna Bird’s trip to New York, read Dave Busiek, Ed Tibbetts, Robert Leonard, Dave Price, and Todd Dorman.
The projection in the statements put out in MAGA and RAGA world is becoming mind numbing. Everything they accuse Democrats of doing they are doing on steroids 🤦♀️
Non-republican Republicans do one thing well; they make my Republican Party look dumber than the Democrats. i do believe they would support King George III and El Duce if given the chance.