Hot Mic Catches Aftermath of Judge Ripping Trump's Prosecutors ‘a New A**hole'
Newark Mayor Ras Baraka reacted colorfully to a judge's scolding of Trump administration prosecutors for their 'embarrassing' decision to charge him with trespassing—then quickly retract those charges.
'Jesus, he tore these people a new a--hole. Good grief,' he said afterward on a hot mic.
That comment, the New Jersey Globe reported, came after a more than five-minute tongue lashing by U.S Magistrate Judge Andre Espinosa aimed at Assistant U.S. Attorney Stephen Demanovich's office over the initial misdemeanor charges against Baraka.
He and other Democrats were arrested outside an immigration detention facility earlier this month while attempting to enter and conduct oversight.
'An arrest of a public figure is not a preliminary investigative tool. It is a severe action,' Espinosa said during Wednesday's virtual court hearing. 'It should only be undertaken after a thorough, dispassionate investigation of credible evidence.'
'Federal prosecutors serve a single paramount client: justice itself,' Espinosa added. 'Your role is not to secure convictions at all costs, nor to satisfy public clamor, nor to advance political agendas. Your allegiance is to the impartial application of the law, to the pursuit of truth, and to the upholding of due process for all.'
Yet that wasn't what happened, the judge said.
'The apparent rush in this case, culminating today in the embarrassing retraction of charges, suggests a failure to adequately investigate,' Espinosa went on. 'Your office must operate with a higher standard than that.'
Baraka's May 9 arrest occurred amid protests against the reopening of Delaney Hall, which Baraka alleges is operating illegally. The Democratic gubernatorial candidate later went on CNN to say his arrest was 'targeted.'
The mayor's prosecution, which some on the right thoroughly enjoyed, was led by interim U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba.
A former personal attorney for Donald Trump and a current counselor to him, Habba listened in on the hearing, according to The Washington Post, and declined to speak.
Habba on Monday also charged Rep. LaMonica McIver with assaulting two ICE agents. McIver has called the prosecution 'purely political.'
The visit to the detention center 'should have been peaceful and short,' she said in a statement.
'Instead, ICE agents created an unnecessary and unsafe confrontation when they chose to arrest Mayor Baraka,' she continued. 'The charges against me are purely political—they mischaracterize and distort my actions, and are meant to criminalize and deter legislative oversight."
The case against McIver will continue—for the moment, at least.
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CBS News
4 minutes ago
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NEW YORK — 'It's easy to forget now,' said Zohran Mamdani, 'but four years ago, Eric Adams was hailed as the new face of Democratic Party politics.' Mamdani, a 33-year old state assemblyman and member of Democratic Socialists of America, had just launched a canvass in Harlem with 100 of his campaign's 29,000 volunteers. He was waiting out a summer rainstorm in a coffee shop, laying out his strategy for the June 24 Democratic mayoral primary — briefly interrupted by three young women who saw him, gasped, and called him 'the mayor.' The candidate finished his point: Adams, who quit an unwinnable primary to seek election as an independent, had 'pitted different sets of New Yorkers against each other, so as to evade any actual institutional response' to the city's problems. A new mayor could confront the Trump administration, which Adams decided not to do. He could also prove that progressives, if given the keys to a city, could make life cheaper and safer. 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But New York Democrats will vote while the Trump administration is ramping up immigration raids and enforcement in major cities; when Israel's 20-month war in Gaza has infuriated younger voters; and when the cost of housing and groceries has become a bigger issue than crime. In polling conducted by Data for Progress, which found Mamdani only narrowly behind Cuomo in the ranked-choice vote, 28% of voters ranked 'housing' as their top issue, 20% ranked other economic issues, and 18% ranked 'crime and public safety.' Support for Israel didn't rank. 'Trump has shown us that on one side of politics, there's a limitless imagination, and on the other, we are constantly constructing an ever-lowering ceiling,' Mamdani told Semafor. He has promised to freeze rent, make city buses fare-free, open city-run discount groceries, and raise taxes on the richest New Yorkers and businesses to pay for this. Those promises sounded more credible, he said, after Democrats watched the new president demand deeper tax cuts at the same time he wanted to buy Greenland. 'I'm talking about less money than Andrew Cuomo gave to Elon Musk as a corporate tax break.' Mamdani entered the race in October, when conventional wisdom said that a more experienced, less progressive candidate could unseat the scandal-plagued Adams. City Comptroller Brad Lander positioned himself early as that candidate, joining the campaign before Mamdani; Adrienne Adams, the (unrelated) city council speaker, jumped in three months ago, after Adams' deal with the Trump DOJ effectively ended his campaign as a Democrat. Cuomo entered the race weeks later, and neither Lander nor Adams has been able so far to dislodge Mamdani as the ex-governor's biggest threat. The ranked-choice voting system complicates any other candidate's strategy. Voters up to five candidates on their ballots, and tabulators count their preferences until one candidate gets a majority. In 2021, the first year under the new system, city sanitation commissioner Kathryn Garcia was the first choice of only 20% of primary voters, but nearly won the primary, because so many Democrats marked her as an alternative, lower on their ballots. 'The state of politics for New York right now for the Democratic Party is really an amazing litmus test for the Democratic Party across the nation,' Adrienne Adams told the New York Editorial Board, in one of its candidate interviews. Progressive groups and leaders, like the Working Families Party and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., have urged voters to leave Cuomo off their ballots and rank only the candidates they align with most. For the WFP, that was Mamdani in first place, followed by Lander, followed by Adams, followed by state senator Zellnor Myrie; for Ocasio-Cortez, it was Mamdani, Adams, Lander, former Comptroller Scott Stringer, and Myrie. The non-Cuomo alternative candidates have sometimes portrayed Mamdani as green and unrealistic. But they've been busier introducing themselves as the responsible alternatives to Cuomo, appealing to the 50% of likely primary voters who view him unfavorably. 'If I'm running against someone, I'm running against Andrew Cuomo. He's who's leading in the polls,' Lander said in an interview after a forum for Jewish voters in the Upper West Side. 'I'm running against a corrupt, abusive, self-serving politician who's only running to rehearse his own grievances.' Mamdani's buoyant, omnipresent social media campaign has been hard for Lander and the rest of the field to compete with. When the spotlight has fallen on him, he has kept it by proposing simpler, bigger, and more aggressive ideas, like free childcare and a graduated rise to a $30 minimum wage. Justin Brannan, a city council member running for comptroller with Mamdani's support, said that he would not support him on BDS. But Adams, he said, had helped create the conditions for an electorate that craved an anti-austerity agenda, and didn't want to be told it was impossible. 'New York City used to be the place for big ideas, and somewhere along the way, we just stopped doing them,' said Brannan. 'De Blasio with universal pre-K was, like, the last time we did something big. The past almost four years with Eric Adams, we've been like, 'Oh, if we can keep the libraries open six days a week, that's a huge victory.'' At the Upper West Side 'New York Jewish Agenda' forum, Stringer proposed a $1 billion 'very, very rainy day' fund to protect the city from Trump administration attacks on grants or programs. Lander suggested putting 'less than $100 million' of the city's Medicaid funding into an independent authority 'so we can provide reproductive and gender affirming care' without Trump interference. Three days later, Mamdani summoned reporters to the Financial District for his plan to 'Trump-proof' New York: The taxes that would raise $10 billion, and total resistance to his deportations. Asked if he agreed with Mayor Adams that the NYPD should arrest protesters who interfered with ICE enforcement, Mamdani rejected the premise. 'It's ironic to hear that from a mayor who literally drove on the sidewalk in the final days of the previous mayoral election,' he said. 'This is an indication of their willingness to be accomplices to what is going on and what ICE agents are inflicting upon New Yorkers.' Six months ago, that answer might have been a problem for Mamdani. But most Democrats assumed, at that time, he had a lower ceiling — that the positions he'd taken would hold him down. After Mamdani's 'Trump-proof' press conference, an X account that clips news interviews shared one of the candidate sticking to his position that ICE should be abolished altogether. 'A lawless president does not mean we abolish entire agencies and our laws,' Adrienne Adams wrote on top of the video. 'People elect us as leaders to solve problems, not pledge allegiance to rigid ideologies.' One day later, she deleted that response, which had been torn apart by pro-Mamdani commenters. It was not, according to her campaign, what she really wanted to say. The decline of Eric Adams, since he wrapped himself around the president's finger, was the catalyst for Mamdani's rise. He presided over falling crime, which lowered the salience of that issue; he suggested that the forced busing of migrants from Texas, to take advantage of the city's generous sheltering laws, was forcing austerity on the city. As Adams receded, with Trump in office, the agenda changed. Mamdani's campaigning changed it too. His early ad campaign, put together by the team that made ads for Bernie Sanders and John Fetterman, got him into the conversation with candidates (Lander et al) who were taken more seriously as potential mayors. He leapt over them as Cuomo's closest competitor — and then put him into the cohort of potential mayors. This involved a lot of risks, taken in attention-getting ways, like his visit to the courthouse where a grad student leader of Gaza protests was being arraigned. Following the candidates, I heard many times that Trump had given Democrats envy of enormous plans that were crisp and memorable and not green-eyeshaded to death; Mamdani was the only contender doing that. Two years ago, some of the same dynamics here played out in Chicago — which has an all-party runoff system, not a Democratic primary then a general election. Voters forced a choice between Brandon Johnson, an anti-austerity progressive, and Paul Vallas, a conservative Democrat who, unfortunately for his campaign, was on tape attacking Barack Obama. If Mamdani wins this primary, I'd expect the specter of Johnson, who is tremendously unpopular now, to hover over New York. Adams is already running as an independent; Cuomo has the ability to. Tilson's campaign, after Cuomo's, is the most oriented around stopping Mamdani. At a weekend stop at a Ukrainian festival, after he gave a short speech while wearing a patch-covered jacket from his trips to bring aid to that country, he warned of a city that would be threatening to Jewish New Yorkers and far more poor, if Mamdani were able to win. 'We are the wealthiest city in the world,' said Tilson. 'I think he and the DSA people he surrounds himself with would create a hostile business environment that would drive away businesses and hurt economic growth.' For In These Times, the socialist writer and editor Bhaskar Sunkara asks whether Mamdani can become the millennial generation's Bernie Sanders. 'Mamdani has shown that it's possible to build a campaign that is simultaneously insurgent and competent.' In the New York Times, Nicholas Fandos studies Mandani's biography, which Cuomo is attacking as scarily unfit for a serious mayor. 'There are candidates in the field with exciting ideas and no track record of delivering on them,' said Lander. In The Free Press, Olivia Reingold why the current trend in the primary is a 'nightmare scenario' for Cuomo, and for New Yorkers who might have supported Adams again. For the Manhattan Institute, Liena Zagare why most of the non-Cuomo candidates are not using their sharpest knives on Mamdani, even as he soars.
