The Feds Charge a Congresswoman With Assaulting an ICE Agent
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The Justice Department charges a Democratic member of Congress with assault and impeding federal agents after a tussle outside an immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. Plus, the Secret Service interviews former FBI Director James Comey over an Instagram post of seashells spelling out the numbers 8647.

Welcome, I'm Kyle Peterson with The Wall Street Journal. We're joined today by my colleagues, Editorial Board Member Manay Ukwe-Berua and columnist Kim Strassel.

On Monday, the interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, Alina Haba, announced federal charges against Congresswoman LaMonica McIver stemming from a confrontation that happened on May 9th at Delaney Hall, a 1,000-bed detention facility used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Newark Mayor Roz Baraka was arrested in that scrum, but those charges are now being dropped.

Yadava alleged in a statement that Representative LaMonica McIver assaulted, impeded, and interfered with law enforcement in violation of federal law. She said that that conduct cannot be overlooked.

Here is McIver responding on an interview on CNN. The charges are absurd. You know, it's ridiculous. I was there to do my job along with my other colleagues. We have done this before. This is our obligation to do. It's in our job description to have oversight over a facility. And the entire situation was escalated by ICE. Manay, we now, as of Tuesday, have this federal charging document issued.

What does it say exactly happened on May the 9th? Well, the events that took place can be divided into two parts, and the part for which Congressman McIver is charged has to do with the second. So it started essentially as a protest of the kind that will be very familiar to listeners. You had four Democratic politicians, three members of Congress from New Jersey, and also the mayor of Newark, who is running for governor of New Jersey, and then you had

basically gathering a crowd outside of this detention facility where the Trump administration is holding people who are suspected of illegal immigration before they could be removed from the country and just rallying against Donald Trump's immigration policies. Then the president,

politicians decided that they wanted to enter the facility and perform an inspection. So as Congressman McIver was describing in that clip, members of Congress are supposed to have some oversight authority over federal facilities of this kind, and so theoretically should be able to enter. The problem is they had the mayor of Newark with them, who of course is not a member of Congress and doesn't have that ability. And so the head of the dissension center decided that they wanted to force Raz Baraka, the mayor of Newark,

to leave, he decided he was not going to go. And then they forcibly removed him and attempted to arrest him for trespassing. Once that happened, Congressman McIver essentially tried to impede the arrest. You can see her in the video fighting her way through a crowd of agents and other people trying to get to the mayor of Newark as if to prevent him from being arrested. And in the course of this, she does...

throw her elbows kind of towards one or two of the agents as she's getting to him. And so the charging document is essentially saying that she was obstructing the federal agent's

ability to remove the mayor and in the course of doing so assaulted this officer. Kim, what's your read of the facts on the ground? One thing that is a little unclear from the charging document is whether these members of Congress had an appointment and approval to enter this facility. I mean, there was a protest

that was going on there. But the charging document describes it this way. It says, "Perimeter cameras show that when the security gate of Delaney Hall opened momentarily to allow a vehicle to enter into the secure area of the facility, McIver and two other members of Congress moved quickly inside the secured area as the gate closed.

It says the mayor thereafter arrived with his security and the people in charge of the facility thought that he was part of the congressional delegation, which is how he ended up then inside. And it's a little bit confusing there. I mean, it's one thing if these members of Congress have advanced notice that they're going on an inspection or going to

given a tour of this facility and show up with that purpose. It's another thing if they're at this protest and the gate opens to let a vehicle inside and they basically walk in after it. Yeah, the first thing that I would note is how Manet started this. It's very important to understand the larger context of this, why all of this was even happening in the first place. This was a protest.

And we've seen this before where Congress people go. I remember AOC going down to the border to film things that were happening there and suggest this was during the last Trump administration to kind of highlight the detention of certain migrants and immigrants.

And it looks as though that is what the Congress people were attempting to do here. The background, just so that everyone understands, is that Delaney Hall, where this is taking place, is a relatively new detention center, which federal government owns this property and

turned it into a detention center, and that has been vigorously rejected and opposed by local officials like the Newark mayor who have tried to argue that they don't have the requisite permits for it to be there. So this center itself is a subject of real debate.

I think that it's also important that we finally have some facts because there was a lot of misreporting and confusion about this in the beginning. There was a suggestion that this scuffle, to the extent that it happened, this altercation somehow happened with regard to the Congress people trying to get into the facility. That is not the case. And I think that gets to your point, Kyle, that members of Congress do have some sort of oversight authority.

And it looks as though, according to this affidavit, while it may not have been planned, it did appear that federal ICE authorities were going to permit them to come in. They were getting ready to go on this tour when this separate question came up about the mayor.

They made that distinction, and I think that's really important. It meant that ICE was going to allow the federal members of Congress to come in, but they had decided that that could not include the mayor because he was not a federal person. So they were aware of this oversight right that members of Congress have. So what we now know is that the altercation, to the extent that it happened, and I think we should assume that the facts that have been laid out in this charging document are generally correct,

that the pushing and the shoving happened with regard to the attempted arrest of this mayor. And just a couple of details. Apparently, the congresswoman here, when she heard their plans that they were going to arrest him, yelled, hell no, hell no, hell no, according to this document, ran up to him, put his arms around him. They described her actions as attempting to make a human shield in an effort to prevent his arrest.

It says she slammed her forearm into a uniformed agent, also tried to restrain that agent and then struck another agent as part of this. It also provided pictures. This is, of course, a very separate question about whether or not these particular charges were warranted. In this case, they are quite aggressive, but at least we now know what the actions were and the context and where they'd happened. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment.

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Welcome back. Menea, I've seen a couple of public videos of this scrum at the detention facility, and they are pretty hard to interpret. I mean, it's a bunch of people kind of pushing back and forth. As Kim suggests, there are some photographs in this federal charging document that

Some of them at least come from non-public sources like body cameras. And there are a couple pictures of the congresswoman's forearm on a federal officer, though in a still picture, it's pretty hard to interpret whether she is pushing or whether she is being pushed in the crowd. And so, I mean, I wonder if there's a distinction here between

impeding federal agents and assaulting federal agents, which is part of the charge. I mean, apparently there were shouts in the crowd of circle the mayor. They were trying to prevent his arrest, which looks like it might be impeding federal agents separate from the conversation about the prudential question of charging a Democratic member of Congress of the opposing party. But I do wonder about the assault charge on this record. Yeah, I think the way that you just

divided those two between the assault side of things and the impeding side of things sounds about right for my viewings of the video. She's clearly pushing through the crowd, which includes many agents swarming as they're all trying to remove the mayor from the perimeter. And as she pushes through, there is a moment in which

She clearly throws her elbows in front of her, and it seems as if her main intention is just to create space for herself to be able to track the mayor, stay close to him, and potentially prevent or at least slow down the arrest. But in the course of doing so, she certainly was not careful about throwing her elbows in a way that could, under a strict reading of the law, probably be interpreted as

an assault. I think that you actually do see even in the video, I believe it's another congressman, Rob Menendez from New Jersey, trying to restrain her. And so it was very clear that she was highly animated, was using a decent amount of force herself. And her goal was to, at the very least, protect the mayor a little bit and try to slow down his arrest. And so whether the charges are a perfect fit for

Exactly how she acted and what her motivation was, that remains to be seen. I think that's a question for a jury potentially, but it's very clear that she was at the very least impeding the actions of the officers. What about that prudential question, Kim? Notably, the federal government has now dropped the charges against the Newark mayor, Raz Baraka.

This is part of the statement from the interim U.S. attorney of New Jersey. After extensive consideration, we have agreed to dismiss Mayor Baraka's misdemeanor charge of trespass for the sake of moving forward in the spirit of public interest. I have invited the mayor to tour Delaney Hall. So they're going to invite him

back into the facility to see what it's all about. Congresswoman is saying in interviews that she had some back and forth with the U.S. Attorney's Office and they wanted her to do some kind of plea deal where, according to her, one side of the story, they wanted her to admit something that she did not do. She says, in the clip that I saw, she didn't specify what that was. Maybe they wanted her to admit to impeding federal agents or something like that. But it certainly strikes me as

fraught territory where you have a Justice Department run by a president of one party, appointees, U.S. attorneys of one party, charging a member of Congress of the other party. So there's a lot to unpack here. First of all, I should note that this has already entered the realm of

So this is already becoming a little bit of political football. House Democrats are outraged over this. They say that they will fight back and do something at a time and a place in a manner of their choosing. I'm not quite sure what that means. Maybe impeachment down the road. I'm not really sure, but they're very unhappy. Republicans, for their part, have already said they want to hold a hearing into this.

and demand answers about this altercation. They are sort of doubling down behind the Justice Department. Look, let's be clear. It's not unheard of for a Department of Justice to file charges against sitting members of Congress. We only just went through the George Santos case.

Interestingly, one of the members of the New Jersey delegation who was there was, as Manay mentioned, Rob Menendez, who happens to be the son of Bob Menendez, who was just recently convicted on corruption charges as a member of the Senate.

and is no longer there. But we tend to think of those charges usually mostly in the form of corruption charges, insider trading charges, misuse of campaign fund charges, misuse of power charges, not really in terms of physical altercation and assault charges, etc. Although, again, we've also had members of Congress in the past who've received DUIs and got cross-eyes with state law officials and authorities. So

It's not impossible. The prudential question, I think, is important, but it's also a double-edged sword. It's very difficult here. On the one hand, you do not want an executive that is flexing its muscles too hard against a Congress. There are separation of powers issues to be there, and it will certainly raise the prospect in some people's minds that this is

A Trump DOJ going after a Democratic member. On the other hand, I think most average Americans think that if you see a federal officer who is arresting an individual, you step back. You do not go and get in the way and encircle somebody.

I think we have to ask the question, one, is that simply a good role model we would like to see our members of Congress presenting for people? That's not the way to deal with situations like this. In my mind, by the way, had this scuffle not happened and they actually arrested this mayor, I think that they'd have looked pretty silly. But that has been somewhat overridden now by the fact that a congressperson was engaged in a physical altercation and it changes the focus of this situation.

And there is the argument no one is above the law. The question that has to be asked is if you or I, Kyle or Manet, were the ones that had gone to stand in front of that person to try to block their arrest and put hands on a federal officer in the process of that, would we be arrested and charged with assault? And I think that there's a decent chance that we probably would have.

One thing also notable about this is that the U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Haba, Trump's one-time personal attorney, is in that role on a temporary basis. She was given an interim appointment by President Trump to fill the vacancy there. That is a temporary appointment that lasts 120 days. So one point of future conflict is if this gets to Senate confirmation on a permanent U.S. attorney appointment,

This will definitely come up and it's possible that there will be members of the Senate that have questions and objections to what the U.S. attorney has done here. Also possible that if she can't get the majority to get confirmed, her term would expire after 120 days. We recently saw that in the

District of Columbia U.S. Attorney's Office, a temporary interim appointment for Ed Martin there expired, said goodbye to his office after Tom Tillis of North Carolina raised some concerns, particularly about Ed Martin's stance on January 6th. So that is one point where we can probably expect to hear more about this from Democrats if that Senate confirmation process begins.

Certainly. I think it's going to be the biggest component of Alina Haba's potential Senate confirmation hearing. She'll have questions about it from senators on both sides of the aisle. But if the facts of the case are as we understand them now, I think that she'll remain on pretty firm ground with Republican senators who are the supporters who she'll need to get across the line. Of course, Republicans control that chamber with a majority of 53 votes.

And I do think that it will be material when she's explaining her thinking in this case that she claims that she was in a negotiation with Congressman McIver about potentially reaching a plea deal. So as we mentioned, the charges that were ultimately filed are pretty strict and

in terms of actually charging her with assault, with impeding the arrest. These are fairly serious charges for actions that, if you look at the video, are somewhat muddled. She doesn't seem to actually have caused any physical pain or harm or anything like that. But if Alina Haba says, hey, I sat down with her. We said, you clearly violated the letter of the law. Are you willing to plea to arrest

smaller charge in return for us not having to actually bring you into the courtroom. And if she had agreed to that, it's possible they could have gone down that route. But it seems like Congressman McIver also sees a political incentive or maybe even a benefit in saying the Trump administration is going after me. They're bringing these charges against me. And so she didn't want to enter into a plea. And so Alina Habo will be able to tell even skeptical senators that

hey, my hand was forced. I had to defend our agents. I had to stand up for the law. I would have liked to avoid a messy courtroom drama. And yet Congressman McIver forced my hand. Hang tight. We'll be right back in a moment. Optimism isn't sunshine and rainbows. It's fixing things, changing the way we fix things. It's running the world on smarter energy. Because if optimism never stops, then change can't either. G.E. Vernova, the energy of change.

Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Welcome back. Part of what is raising questions, though, Kim, I think, is the aggressive interpretations of some of these statutes that the Trump administration, or at least some of its members, are taking. And that brings us to James Comey, the former director of the FBI, and the controversy involving him recently. He was recently interviewed by the U.S. Secret Service at the Washington, D.C. field office in connection to an

Instagram post that he put up. He says that he was on the beach. He saw some shells that were laid out in the numbers 8647, and he posted a picture of it. Here is what he said in a recent interview. We stood over it and said he's speaking about him and his wife. I think it's some kind of political message.

She said, "86 when I was a server," she did a lot of working in restaurants, "meant to remove an item from the menu when you ran out of ingredients." I said, "Well, to me as a kid, it always meant to leave a place, to ditch a place." I said, "That's really clever." Later, he said that any thought that this was a suggestion, a call for violence, he said that is crazy. Yeah, that is the way that it is being pitched by some members of the Trump administration. Here is Tulsi Gabbard on Fox News last week. Any other person

with the position of influence that he has, people who take very seriously what a guy of his stature, his experience, and what the propaganda media has built him up to be,

I'm very concerned for the president's life. We've already seen assassination attempts. I'm very concerned for his life. And James Comey, in my view, should be held accountable and put behind bars for this. And here is James Comey responding to this controversy on MSNBC on Monday. Well, it's not my first rodeo. I would hate something like this or the audit or all the investigations to happen to someone who doesn't have my experience because I look at it and I think there's another one of those.

But when it's one of the real problems we have in this country right now is the use of the president's power aiming at individuals.

who don't have my background or experience, like a Chris Krebs or any others that have been targeted, law firms being targeted. This is a real problem that people should not look past. My thing, to me, and I hope to everybody else, is just a distraction that goes away in a weekend. But there's something much more important going on here, the use of power to aim at individuals eroding the rule of law.

Kim, what do you make of this tempest in a teapot? I guess to my eye, why James Comey thinks that it's his role to be posting any political messages onto Instagram for his followers, it strikes me as perhaps bad judgment, but pretty far from any sort of incitement or anything under the First Amendment doctrines that the judiciary has laid down.

- Yeah, first of all, can I just say, I love how this debate has fleshed out everybody's varying determinations of what to 86 something means. I guess I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks because in my mind to be 86 was always to get thrown out of a bar, but that could just be me. Look, this is a classic example of where I actually just wish the administration had not done this because talking about tripping over your own message,

you know, what James Comey did there with the seashells, it's so James Comey in that it's just sort of smarmy and cutesy. And, you know, he's not going to just put them himself out there and say, we should get rid of this president. We should vote him out. Or, you know, this president is awful. He's got to do it in some like, look, aren't I clever kind of way? Look, I just happened to find these seashells on the seashore. And, you know, isn't that interesting? But, you

There are so many interpretations of the word 86. And yes, it is absolutely true that in more recent years, some people have adopted that phrase to mean to kill someone. And so it can be used in a dangerous fashion. But I would not wager that most people

Most people think of that term, certainly of a certain generation, think of that term in that way. And I think also your point about free speech is very important. I mean, he is entitled to have his interpretation of what that is. I think the bigger point is just, you know, what is Jim Comey doing here anyway? Just go off and do your little professorship and get your little money talking on TV and write your next book and just...

stop causing these controversies. But again, I think the Trump administration is stepping on that message. The focus should be on the silliness and irrelevancy, by the way, of Jim Comey these days, rather than giving him a podium to go back on and say, oh, look, I'm being targeted by the Trump administration. He loves nothing more than

than that kind of thing. And it's an unfortunate situation. Menae, we'll give you the last word and your crack at Jim Comey. I guess I agree with Kim here, though. I would be surprised if this goes any further, but this kind of thing stepping on its own message is...

part of what causes people to wonder when they hear things like the headlines about Congresswoman McIver. Right. I think that the response of Tulsi Gabbard in particular saying without any nuance that Jim Comey should be arrested for this does show a certain attitude in the Trump administration sometimes of overreacting to things of this kind. But in general, I do think that Jim Comey clearly...

should not have posted that image and probably, if I had to guess, was aware of both interpretations. And so he felt like he could get away with a little barb at Donald Trump, who he detests, while also having plausible deniability and also is enjoying his time back in the spotlight as a consequence of this whole episode.

Thank you, Manay and Kim. Thank you all for listening. You can email us at pwpodcast at wsj.com. If you like the show, please hit that subscribe button, and we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of Potomac Watch.

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