Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) said during an interview on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Saturday that the historic indictment of former President Donald Trump is “purely political” based in part on the timing of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s decision to pursue the case.
Issa, a longtime oversight hawk now seated on the Judiciary Committee and Weaponization of the Federal Government Select Subcommittee, described the moment — in which a former president has been indicted for the first time in history and is set to be arraigned Tuesday — as a “special time for Americans who want freedom.”
Issa tied his work on the weaponization panel to Trump’s indictment, saying the select subcommittee works to combat “what happens in third world countries,” such as governments infringing on the freedom Americans have to choose their leaders.
“Once it’s agreed that [the government] is weaponized, if the other side gets the authority — which is what happens in third world countries — they then use this weaponization to make sure they keep power,” Issa said. “That’s what we’re preventing. We’re preventing the loss of your freedom and the free will of the people to change who their leaders are, something we’ve maintained since, you know, 1889, and it won’t be maintained if we allow incumbent governments to basically weaponize against their adversaries.”
Listen:
Issa contended that Bragg’s decision to prosecute Trump based off a years-old case related to Daniels and convicted felon Michael Cohen is not just a “dangerous” move toward possible election interference — Trump is the current 2024 GOP presidential primary frontrunner — but is also questionable in terms of its timing.
“It’s not only dangerous, but it has a timeline that’s particularly interesting because prior to DA Bragg being elected, the U.S. attorney’s office looked at this accusation from 2016 and said there’s no there there,” Issa explained.
The California Republican continued, “There’s no violation under the federal election law based on the fact that there were other very good reasons that the president used his own personal money to put this Stormy Daniels thing behind him … but Bragg was running for office saying he would indict the president, so two months later, he gets in and he says, ‘You know what? Now that I’m in, I’ve looked at it and there isn’t enough,’ and he makes it go away for a year — for a year he doesn’t do any additional investigation.”
Soon after Bragg took office in January 2022, the New York Times revealed that two prosecutors resigned from the district attorney’s office in protest because Bragg had, at the time, indefinitely suspended investigating Trump.
Issa observed of the chain of events, “What do they do? Now they, with no new discovery, they impanel a grand jury and indict him. That timeline should be devastating to anyone that looks at it and says, ‘Well, wait a second, you don’t really get to say, yes, no, yes, no without something happening, without evidence, and not have it legitimately criticized as purely political,’ which it is.”
Related: Rep. Comer: NYC DA Bragg Investigation into Trump ‘Is a Political Stunt’
Write to Ashley Oliver at aoliver@breitbart.com. Follow her on Twitter at @asholiver.