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As Juvenile Crime Soars, DC Attorney General Targets Conservatives Instead

by Summer October 3, 2023 0 comments

By: Summer

Talk About Misplaced Priorities!!!

Crime, particularly juvenile crime, has soared in Washington, D.C., this year. The city passed the 200-homicide mark last week, the fastest it has hit 200 since the height of drug violence in the 1990s. Violent crime among juveniles is also up, particularly carjackings, which have left hundreds of victims injured, traumatized, and sometimes dead.

The man in charge of prosecuting juvenile offenders, Washington, D.C., Attorney General Brian Schwalb, apparently isn’t bothered by any of this. With all the arrogance of a man certain of his ideological purity, Schwalb is laser-focused on another threat to D.C. residents’ public safety — the longstanding work of Leonard Leo, co-chairman of the board of the Federalist Society.

After a far-left activist group, Campaign for Accountability, filed a complaint with Schwalb earlier this year, he has opened an investigation into Leo’s management of two nonprofit organizations. The Campaign for Accountability alleges that Leo used his control of the BH Group and CRC Advisors to overpay his for-profit consulting firms by millions of dollars. The Campaign for Accountability says this violates Washington, D.C.’s laws against using charities for private benefit.

Abusing nonprofit status to enrich oneself or others is a serious matter. But Schwalb seems uninterested in investigating other suspicious activities in this category, such as the mess of Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research is in Massachusetts, far outside Schwalb’s jurisdiction in Washington, D.C., but then, so are the nonprofit organizations he accuses Leo of mismanaging. One is in Virginia and the other in Texas, neither of which falls under Schwalb’s authority.

Schwalb spending time and money attacking Leo instead of fighting juvenile crime in D.C. is explicable once you check his past, and Leo’s. Schwalb is a longtime donor to Democratic campaigns, and his old law firm, Venable LLP, has long represented giant far-left dark money groups such as the Sixteen Thirty Fund, the Hub Project, and the New Venture Fund. The Federalist Society and Leo in particular deserve much of the credit — and blame from the Left — for getting three excellent justices nominated and confirmed to the Supreme Court, where their constitutional originalism is a gnawing irritant to the Left, which wants unbridled power.

To Schwalb, this is far more distressing than the mayhem caused by juvenile and other crime. In his candidate questionnaire for the D.C. attorney general job, Schwalb wrote, “I do not believe we make our city safer by arresting and locking away youthful criminal offenders, nor do I believe we can arrest and prosecute our way out of crime problems.”

Pressed at a town hall meeting to explain why his office was so lenient, Schwalb added, “Kids are kids, and when you’re talking about teenagers in particular — their brains are developing, their minds are developing, and they’re biologically prone to make mistakes. That’s what we’ve all done as we’ve grown up.”

Young people pay attention to who is punished for crimes and who is not. When they see other children getting off with slaps on the wrist for thefts and carjackings, there will be more juvenile thefts and carjackings. No matter how much Democrats and their libertarian allies hate to hear it, law enforcement and punishment work.

Schwalb and his dark-money allies should spend more time prosecuting real crimes occurring in their jurisdictions and less time prosecuting conservative organizations that aren’t even based in their communities.