Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York ripped into Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson on Friday night for saying that Republican control of Congress is the only thing keeping President Donald Trump from being held to account for his numerous scandals and abuses of power during his second term in the White House.Asked about comments made by the Speaker earlier in the day, Ocasio-Cortez told MS-NOW’s Jen Psaki that Johnson characterized future efforts to investigate or accountability for possible misdeeds or corruption by Trump, his family members, or members of his administration “as though it’s some partisan witch hunt,” she said. “But if you don’t want to be prosecuted for crimes, don’t do crimes.”Ocasio-Cortez, often referred to by her initials AOC, had been asked about remarks Speaker Johnson made at the annual summit of the right-wing Faith and Freedom Coalition, a group with close ties to Trump and the Christian nationalist movement that supports him.“If we lose the midterms, heaven forbid, these Democrats—y’all, impeachment isn’t even the real concern,” Johnson told the crowd. “They will turn every committee of Congress into an investigative body, and they’ll go after the president’s family, the Cabinet, his donors, friends, half of you in this room will be targeted.”The House speaker added, “I run the protection program. We’ll take care of you, OK?”Johnson’s remarks unsurprisingly sparked a series of critical reactions, including AOC’s.“Mike Johnson saying the quiet part out loud: protect the powerful. S---- everyone else,” said Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta (D-Pa.).“The Speaker of the House just talked like a guy guarding a operation that can’t survive daylight,” said Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.). “Because that’s exactly what he’s doing.”“You don’t need a ‘protection program’ for people who did nothing wrong,” Levin continued. “You need one when you’re afraid of what the books would show. Congress is supposed to be a check on power, not the muscle protecting it. Johnson is a total disgrace to the office. November can’t come fast enough.”What Johnson is “talking about,” explained AOC in her interview with Psaki, is a Republican Party in Congress “running a protection racket” for Trump and his cronies, both in and out of government. “And we are already seeing that this Trump administration has run what some have called one of the largest pedophile protection programs in American history,” she continued, referencing the scandal surrounding the disgraced convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. “And so when Mike Johnson tells a group of wealthy donors, I’m the only thing standing between you, and a consequence that should rattle at the conscience of every American,” she said. “What he wants to do is create—or rather, not even create, because it’s already been created—but protect a class of impunity in America that says, ‘You can commit whatever crime, and so long as you pay a check to us, we will protect you.’ And that is a model of extortion in American politics. And you know what? That’s their pitch.”Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, responded to Johnson’s comments by detailing just a few examples of possible corruption by Trump that deserve much more scrutiny and congressional oversight.“Trump has almost tripled his net worth during this term. His sons bought drone companies and immediately received military contracts right before Trump started another war. Trump threw a crypto contest to see who could buy the most of his meme coin, with the prize being exclusive access to him in his presidential capacity,” D-Arrigo noted. “His son-in-law is getting billions in business deals from the countries and oligarchs wanting political favors. Large donors are spending millions to get pardons and investigations dropped. Trump is still actively covering up the Epstein files,” she added. “And these are just a handful of the things that were publicly reported on—imagine what we don’t know about yet.”D’Arrigo called on voters to help “flip the House” away from the Republicans and investigate these examples of grift and corruption as well as others.
Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) warned this week that President Donald Trump has openly acknowledged directing federal prosecutors to investigate elections whose results he dislikes — a statement the congressman argued the president made plainly and even boasted about."Trump just told the country, out loud, that he picks up the phone and orders federal prosecutors to investigate elections when he does not like how the vote is going," Levin wrote, adding that the president "bragged about it twice this week."According to Levin, Trump described calling a U.S. attorney in California, telling the prosecutor to "do me a favor" and look into a race his preferred candidate was at risk of losing.The congressman then laid out why he sees the claim as baseless. There is no evidence of fraud in California's primary, Levin wrote, noting that even Steve Hilton — the Republican candidate Trump claims to have rescued — said he never heard about any such call. Levin added that Los Angeles County's top elections official stated that no one at the Justice Department had touched their process.Levin attributed the slow count not to fraud but to the thoroughness of California's system, where every registered voter is mailed a ballot, every returned ballot has its signature checked against the voter's file, and late-arriving mail ballots remain valid if postmarked by Election Day."Slow is not fraud," he wrote.Levin said he would support responsible, legal efforts to speed up vote counting through better funding and modernized ballot processing. What he would not accept, he argued, is a president investigating his way to a preferred outcome.The congressman tied the behavior back to 2020, writing that because Trump still can't admit he lost that year, "every election he dislikes becomes a crime in his mind." The post was amplified by political scientist Norman Ornstein.
