He held an important position – U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia – but Matthew Graves has been nearly invisible in the national media over the last four years as a Biden appointee. They didn’t seriously cover what he’s done, and what he’s failed to do.
What he’s done is hyperactively prosecute Jan. 6 protesters – whether violent or nonviolent. Team Graves was so aggressive that they were still arresting riot suspects a week before Christmas, long after Donald Trump won, and almost four years after the riot.
MSNBC legal analyst Barb McQuade is, unsurprisingly, a huge fan: “All Americans owe DC US Attorney Matthew Graves and his staff a debt of gratitude for their work to prosecute the 1,600 defendants who attacked our Capitol on Jan 6, 2021.” This is fact-mangling. Many defendants didn’t “attack” at all, like the “praying grandma” who they wanted to sentence to 10 years in jail for being inside the Capitol (attacking no one) for 10 minutes.
What Graves has failed to do is prosecute actual criminals in the nation’s capital. In 2023, there was a 35% increase in homicides, a 67% increase in robberies, an 82% increase in car thefts and a 23% increase in thefts. Overall, violent crime was up 39%, and all crime was up 26%.
But Graves’s office of 330 prosecutors declined to prosecute in 67% of cases. That’s the polar opposite of their prosecutorial war on hundreds of pro-Trump protesters. The Heritage Foundation pointed out the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Diego had the same number of prosecutors, and only a 22.6 % declination rate.
To demonstrate the lack of controversy around Graves, a simple Nexis search of The New York Times found just five stories mentioning him over the last four years.
Three of them concerned his refusal to prosecute Hunter Biden, according to IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley. His inaction underlined how perfectly pro-Biden he was.
One concerned the sentencing of a man who posed as a federal agent to secure rental properties and then failed to pay rent. The newest one came in May, when activist Lauren Handy was sentenced to 57 months in prison for blockading a D.C. abortion clinic in 2020. Graves proclaimed, “People cannot resort to using force and intimidation to prevent others from engaging in lawful activity simply because they disagree with the law.”
So violent carjackers and violent BLM rioters were rarely prosecuted, but dramatic attempts to blockade the killing of unborn children gets you five years in the slammer. Is this Democrats at work or what?
Speaking of Democrats, Graves also sent Trump supporters Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro to prison for four months for refusing to testify to the Pelosi-Picked Panel probing Jan. 6. Graves denounced Bannon for refusing to cooperate with Pelosi: “His refusal to do so was deliberate and now a jury has found that he must pay the consequences.”
But when House Republicans held Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress over his refusal to comply with a subpoena for audio recordings of President Joe Biden’s mentally bumbling interviews with special counsel Robert Hur, no one was going to send anyone to jail, just as these partisans ignored the contempt of Congress finding for Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder. There were no consequences.
This is an important demonstration of bias by omission. While everyone around Trump is tagged as “controversial” and extreme and even dangerous, our media supported everything Matthew Graves was doing, so he went almost unmentioned.
It can’t be called journalism. It’s called teamwork.
