The first call came just before eight o’clock. Then the second, then the third. It was a Monday in May last year, and LaMonica McIver, a 39-year-old first-term congresswoman from New Jersey, stood in the lobby of her hotel in Washington, D.C., frozen mid-step on her way out to dinner. Her attorney, her chief of staff, her colleagues—everyone who kept her life running, flooding her phone like a five-alarm fire. She was being charged with federal crimes—including assault on an officer—over a confrontation with ICE agents during a congressional oversight visit to a detention facility in her district just a few days prior. The charges came courtesy of Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, who was then serving as the top federal prosecutor in McIver’s home state. If convicted, the congresswoman faces up to 17 years in prison.
These people are nuts, McIver thought. They can’t charge me—I didn’t do anything wrong. Seventeen years, her daughter—assault on a federal officer!—for what, doing her job? Habba’s office had floated some threats in the past few days, sure, but threats are the weather in Trump’s Washington, and no sitting member of Congress has ever been charged for conducting oversight. That McIver, who had been on the job for all of eight months, would be the one to change that was laughable. Certainly not at eight o’clock on a Monday; the clerk’s office closes at five. No matter—Habba, resourceful as ever, had simply posted the charges on Twitter and let the courts catch up in the morning.
