House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik is apparently a contender for her party’s vice presidential nomination, and with that in mind, the New York Republican is apparently trying to corner the market in baseless ethics complaints in the hopes of making Donald Trump happy.
In fact, as regular readers know, Stefanik has specifically gone after a series of law enforcement officials involved in holding the former president accountable, filing official ethics complaints against two judges, a state attorney general, and special counsel Jack Smith. All of this has happened over the course of just six months, as chatter about the congresswoman pursuing national office has intensified.
One of these complaints, however, has apparently already flopped. The Daily Beast reported this week that one of Stefanik’s four stunts “fizzled out quietly months ago,” though this is just now coming to the surface.
New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur F. Engoron and his law clerk, Allison Greenfield, were cleared by a state commission of allegations of “inappropriate bias and judicial intemperance.” … During Trump’s bank fraud trial last year, the former president employed allies to engage in bad-faith attacks on Engoron and Greenfield. The most prominent was an ethics complaint filed by Stefanik to the state’s judicial commission, describing “serious concerns about … inappropriate bias and judicial intemperance shown.”
The Daily Beast’s reporting has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, though Stefanik’s office didn’t make much of an effort to deny the article’s accuracy. “New York’s court system is partisan, corrupt, and rigged. Chairwoman Elise Stefanik and House Republicans will continue to expose the blatant illegal lawfare and weaponization of the government and courts against President Trump,” the GOP leader’s executive director told The Daily Beast in a statement.
At first blush, this might seem like an embarrassing setback for Stefanik. After all, she went after a judge ostensibly in the hope that the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct would take her complaints against Engoron seriously. The fact that commissioners appear to have discarded her concerns looks like a failure.
But that’s not entirely right — because in all likelihood, the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct wasn’t Stefanik’s intended audience.
Rather, this was a stunt intended to score cheap points at Mar-a-Lago. If the reporting is correct and her complaint has been rejected, it doesn’t much matter because it wasn’t a serious ethics filing in the first place.
Trump was probably pleased to see that Stefanik made the complaint against the judge that held him accountable for systemic business fraud. The outcome was irrelevant.
