Matthew Graves, appointed by Joe Biden in 2021 to lead the most powerful U.S. Attorney’s office in the nation, steps down but not before leaving behind a legacy of human wreckage.
Two weeks after the U.S. Senate confirmed his nomination as U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia in November 2021, Matthew Graves indicted longtime Trump confidante Steve Bannon on contempt of Congress charges.
The move represented how Graves would conduct himself in office. As the nation’s capital descended into a deadly and dangerous crime wave, Graves, also responsible for prosecuting local violent crime, devoted most of his resources to doing Joe Biden’s political dirty work: rounding up, charging, and imprisoning Americans who protested the 2020 election on January 6, 2021.
Graves today announced he will resign effective January 16, 2025. In a lengthy press release, his office bragged about Graves’ success in managing what the Department of Justice calls the “Capitol Siege” probe into the events of January 6:
On January 6, 2021, a violent mob of several thousand individuals stormed the Capitol and the United States briefly lost control of the grounds around the Capitol and much of the Capitol, itself. More than 140 law enforcement officers were injured during the siege of the Capitol, making it the largest single-day mass assault of law enforcement officers in our nation’s history. These events triggered the largest investigation in DOJ history. To date, roughly 1,600 people have been charged in connection with the attack with almost 1,100 having already been sentenced for their conduct. There have been over 170 contested trials with the United States prevailing in more than 99% of them. These convictions include the first seditious conspiracy convictions since the trials stemming from the first bombing of the World Trade Center in the 1990s. Because politically motivated violence and destruction rip at the fabric of our society, Mr. Graves made federally prosecuting such crimes a priority.
Equally as destructive to the “fabric of our society” are politically motivated prosecutions that destroy innocent lives while destroying public trust in the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. It will take decades to repair the institutional damage caused by Graves and his superiors, Attorney General Merrick Garland and Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, in their vengeful pursuit of Donald Trump and his supporters.
By Julie Kelly
