He held an vital place – U.S. Lawyer for the District of Columbia – however Matthew Graves has been practically invisible within the nationwide media over the past 4 years as a Biden appointee. They didn’t critically cowl what he is finished, and what he is did not do.
What he’s finished is hyperactively prosecute January 6 protesters – whether or not violent or nonviolent. Crew Graves was so aggressive that they had been nonetheless arresting riot suspects per week earlier than Christmas, lengthy after Donald Trump gained, and virtually 4 years after the riot.
MSNBC authorized analyst Barb McQuade is, unsurprisingly, an enormous fan: “All Individuals owe DC US Lawyer Matthew Graves and his employees a debt of gratitude for his or her work to prosecute the 1,600 defendants who attacked our Capitol on Jan 6, 2021.” That is fact-mangling. Many defendants didn’t “assault” in any respect, like Rebecca Lavrenz, the “praying grandma” who they wished to condemn to 10 years in jail for being contained in the Capitol (attacking nobody) for ten minutes.
What Graves has did not do is prosecute precise criminals within the nation’s capital. In 2023, there was a 35 % improve in homicides, a 67 % improve in robberies, an 82 % improve in automobile thefts and a 23 % improve in thefts. Total, violent crime was up 39 %, and all crime was up 26 %.
However Graves’s workplace of 330 prosecutors declined to prosecute in 67 % of instances. That’s the polar reverse of their prosecutorial warfare on a whole bunch of pro-Trump protesters. The Heritage Basis identified the U.S. Lawyer’s workplace in San Diego had the identical variety of prosecutors, and solely a 22.6 % declination fee.
To show the shortage of controversy round Graves, a easy Nexis search of The New York Occasions discovered simply 5 tales mentioning him over the past 4 years.
Three of them involved his refusal to prosecute Hunter Biden, in keeping with IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley. His inaction underlined how completely pro-Biden he was.
One involved the sentencing of a person who posed as a federal agent to safe rental properties after which did not pay hire. The most recent one got here in Could, when “anti-abortion activist” Lauren Helpful was sentenced to 57 months in jail for blockading a D.C. abortion clinic in 2020. Graves proclaimed, “Individuals can not resort to utilizing pressure and intimidation to stop others from participating in lawful exercise just because they disagree with the regulation.”
So violent carjackers and violent BLM rioters had been hardly ever prosecuted, however dramatic makes an attempt to blockade the killing of unborn kids will get you 5 years within the slammer. Is that this Democrats at work or what?
Talking of Democrats, Graves additionally despatched Trump supporters Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro to jail for 4 months for refusing to testify to the Pelosi-Picked Panel probing January 6. Graves denounced Bannon for refusing to cooperate with Pelosi: “His refusal to take action was deliberate and now a jury has discovered that he should pay the implications.”
However when Home Republicans held Lawyer Normal Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over his refusal to adjust to a subpoena for audio recordings of President Biden’s mentally bumbling interviews with Particular Counsel Robert Hur, nobody was going to ship anybody to jail, simply as these partisans ignored the contempt of Congress discovering for Obama’s Lawyer Normal Eric Holder. There have been no penalties.
This is a vital demonstration of bias by omission. Whereas everybody round Trump is tagged as “controversial” and excessive and even harmful, our media supported the whole lot Matthew Graves was doing, so he went virtually unmentioned.
It may possibly’t be known as journalism. It’s known as teamwork.
