New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is sweating bullets right now, demanding to know if she’s being investigated by the Justice Department, which is under the authority of Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Trump pick.
AOC wrote up a very unusual letter to Bondi in which she pointed out how she’s been criticized on multiple occasions by President Donald Trump’s “border czar” Tom Homan after she put together a webinar to teach illegal migrants about their rights during confrontations with deportation agents.
Ocasio-Cortez has defended her actions passionately, likely out of fear of legal consequences, asserting that what what she did fell under the First Amendment right to free speech. However, the congresswoman still wants “clarity on whether the Department of Justice (DOJ) has yielded to political pressure and attempts to weaponize the agency against elected officials whose speech they disagree with.”
Oh man. Is that not ironic? AOC, a diehard Democrat who supported the legal witch hunt against Trump that resulted in 94 felony charges brought against him in several cases, complaining about the DOJ being weaponized against her?
These people are insufferable.
“It has been 14 days since Mr. Homan first threatened to weaponize your agency, but I have not yet heard any referral from the federal government,” she said in the letter, according to The Hill. “Homan’s actions undercut core Constitutional rights and further transparency is necessary.”
Trump, on the campaign trail, had vowed to make the deportation of millions of people living in the country illegally a top priority of his second term. And Homan, who served as a top immigration enforcer under President Obama and in Trump’s first term, is leading the charge. In a series of news interviews this month, Homan suggested Ocasio-Cortez had violated federal laws by hosting the Feb. 12 “Know Your Rights” seminar, which she’s characterized as offering “practical guidance on how to interact with” deportation officials.
Homan saw something more sinister. A day after the event, he said Ocasio-Cortez might be “impeding” the government’s efforts to enforce immigration laws. Homan said he’d sent an email to the deputy attorney general asking him to examine the episode.
“Maybe AOC is going to be in trouble now,” Homan went on to say during a Feb. 13 interview with Fox News pundit Laura Ingraham.
Ever since then, Homan has been making bigger and bigger threats against AOC by suggesting she could be in legal trouble for trying “to educate people how they evade law enforcement.”
In the letter Ocasio-Cortez send to Bondie, she included quotes from the First Amendment — probably the first time she’s read it — which forbids “abridging the freedom of speech … or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
She then accuses Homan of using the DOJ “to politically intimidate duly elected officials” — something she deemed “a textbook threat to the right to free speech in the United States.”
“Threatening criminal proceedings for exercising the First Amendment is itself a violation of the First Amendment,” Ocasio-Cortez’s letter read.
“Educating the public about their rights, especially in a time of rising uncertainty, is a key part of our responsibility as elected officials,” she concluded. “A government that uses threats of DOJ investigations to suppress free speech is a threat to all, regardless of political ideology.”
Where was this attitude when Trump and other conservatives were being wrongfully prosecuted for simply opposing Biden? She’s conveniently flipped on the other side of the weaponization debate because it benefits her at the moment.
Hypocrisy at its finest.