Good News: Bragg Drops Charges Against Bodega Worker Jose Alba

BUCK: We see in New York a rare bit of good news on the criminal justice front as Jose Alba, the bodega employee, 62 years old who defended himself. And we can all say this now with even greater clarity in a sense, because there’s no alleged criminal charge against him, they dropped the murder charges in New York.

The district attorney here after a massive outcry, dropped the murder charge against Jose Alba.

Clay, I’m of two minds about this. I want to tell you what I’m thinking, and then you tell me legally and then politically, you know, what you’re seeing here. On the one hand, of course, this is the right decision. This is the just decision for this period of time.

But the fact that this could have even happened, when you have clear color video, you know, up close of the entire event, you — it’s you will on video camera, there’s audio, the whole — you saw everything you needed to see here as district attorney, the entire incident captured. And not only did they charge him, they charged him with second-degree murder, and they wanted initially a half a million dollars bail.

Clay, they wanted to hold this guy without even letting him go home until the trial. That was the purpose initially of the district attorney. How can we feel about Democrat-controlled prosecutors’ offices at a time when the most obvious self-defense case on video requires this kind of outcry for them to drop murder charges?

CLAY: I think it’s a political calculation by DA Alvin Bragg. And let me give you my analysis here, Buck. Alvin Bragg basically has been rational when it comes to the Trump prosecutions and investigations that they’ve been attempting in New York City.

He effectively said, hey, we ain’t got nothing here. And the prosecutors that had been investigating and wanted to bring these charges, the DA were so furious that he said that that they walked out, they went and told the New York Times and Alvin Bragg got raked over the coals for not being sufficiently anti-Trump in his analysis of these cases.

I think this is the, “I’m going to uber-woke here and BLM is not gonna mad at me too. I’ve already got the anti-Trump people who are furious because I’ve decided that looking at all the evidence, there is not much of a case against Donald Trump here in New York.” And that’s effectively what he did.

And then I think simultaneously, he had to have seen this video. There’s no way if you are Alvin Bragg that you did not watch this video. And I think he said, “We’re gonna overcharge and we are going to go way over the top on this guy because if we don’t, BLM is going to come after us, and then I’m gonna have BLM and the anti-Trump people angry at me, and I can’t manage that as a DA in New York City; so we’re gonna overcharge here, and then when I have to walk back the charges, no one can accuse me of not protecting black lives in New York City.” I think that was his entire calculus. I think I just walked through the whole thing with you.

BUCK: Lee Zeldin, who is running against Hochul — now, he’s a Republican. But we’ve had Lee on the show. He’s a good man. He’s a patriot. He’s a smart guy.

I’m really hoping, just for the benefit of New York State, that enough New Yorkers wake up, okay, stop with this Democrat nonsense of, “Oh, it’s all — you know, the whole — all of our rights are being taken away.” That’s all the CNN noise. You want a state that has people coming to it where business is flourishing and people are safe on the streets, vote for Lee Zeldin, right?

He has promised — he told us this — that the first day he’s governor, he’s gonna fire Alvin Bragg. So your point about — there are some who believe that if the crime situation continues into the fall, our friend Mark Simone on WOR NYC, fellow radio host, great guy, he thinks that Hochul may actually fire Bragg as it gets closer to the election if that is an issue that resonates because people are sick of this nonsense.

When you see the data that it’s up 37% year over year, even the mayor, Adams, who has not been doing a good job, he saw this video.

CLAY: Yeah, to his credit. That’s what I was gonna say.

BUCK: I stand with the bodega worker who’s trying to do his job and was assaulted. I mean, Clay, I’ve sat through law enforcement training, intelligence officer trainings when you did use of force stuff, right? You could use that video as, “Here is what a self-defense case looks like.” It is 101 level analysis.

CLAY: Let’s also point out that GoFundMe refused to allow Jose Alba to raise money for his own defense and that GoFundMe, whoever is running that ridiculously woke company now, has been on the wrong side of a bunch of cases, right? They wouldn’t allow Kyle Rittenhouse to raise money. Jury hears all the evidence, much of it on video as well. Clear case of self-defense.

This a clear case of self-defense. Based on the identity of who is defending themselves, GoFundMe is deciding whether or not they deserve to have legal representation, which is, again, as a lawyer, the very, in essence, of the worst thing — if you want to talk about historically — the worst thing that you could do, it’s deciding that you don’t even deserve a good legal defense? I mean, it’s wild.

BUCK: To be woke is to be pro-criminal, to ignore victims, and be anti-police. That’s actually the trajectory. That’s actually the thought process. Pro-criminal, ignore victims, hate the cops. That is what wokeness demands of people today.

And this is why you keep seeing incident after incident where it’s not even a close call and they’re blaming the cops, you know? We talked about this over the weekend where you had this guy who’s shooting —

CLAY: In Minneapolis.

BUCK: — into an apartment with children, Minneapolis, and there are people gathering, like, with candlelight vigils outside because of how evil and racist this shooting was.

CLAY: And who are most of those people, Buck?

BUCK: They’re white libs.

CLAY: Biden voters.

BUCK: Of course. This is the same people that were yelling at me for my mask in Nashville or my mask take, I should say.

CLAY: I think this is really important. Because what Democrats have allowed to happen is — and this happens with the Latinx, this happens with BLM protests — there is a segment of the population in America, the woke white electorate which is now the base of the Democrat Party.

I mean, that’s not me saying that; if you look at the data, whites who are woke are becoming more and more the voice of the Democrat Party and the Democrats are losing Hispanic, Asian, and black support. In fact, there was a great article at CNN, of all places, Buck, that pointed out that in this era where the Democrats want to sell racial identity politics and division all the time, that we’re actually trending towards a less racially diverse electorate.

In other words, what I mean by that — and I didn’t say it well — what I mean by that is because black and Asian and Hispanic voters are moving towards the Republican Party, the gap in how the races vote is becoming less significant.

At a time when you would look around the country and think, boy, we are filled with racial strife, the woke white community, which I believe is primarily driving the racial strife, is actually sending people who are black and Hispanic and Asian to the Republican Party because these minority voters are frustrated with how much the white, woke class has taken over.

And they’re sitting around in their inner city communities, many of them saying, “Wait a minute. You’re not living on a day-to-day basis with the crime that we have here. You show up for your BLM protest so you can take a picture and post it on Instagram alongside of a Ukraine flag, and then when you leave, the crime waves happen and you don’t care at all.”

And this a good example of Chicago, Buck. Highland Park, everybody’s all up in arms over the shooting at Highland Park. Every single weekend, on average, that many people get shot in Chicago, and no one even blinks. It doesn’t even get a paragraph in the New York Times or the Washington Post, MSNBC, and CNN don’t talk about it at all. When it impacts the white, woke, everybody’s like, oh, my God. Crime is out of control. When it impacts these inner city communities, nobody even blinks. And they’re seeing it.

BUCK: We do have, though, more information — you know, again, the Jose Alba outcome here is the right outcome. But I think at some level it’s almost like a brushback pitch from the district attorney, which is to say he’s telling everybody, you know, if you’re gonna defend yourself, it better be the most clear and captured on video thing possible, because if there’s any race politics involved, you are gonna go to prison, right? Even if it is a self-defense case.

CLAY: If it’s a white guy instead of a Hispanic guy who stabs this black guy, does Alvin Bragg drop charges?

BUCK: He might have put it to a jury.

CLAY: I’m talking about the exact same case, except instead of Jose Alba being I think from the Dominican Republic, is that where he’s from?

BUCK: He’s Hispanic, yes. Sorry. AOC would say he is Latinx.

CLAY: Yeah, Latinx. If instead of being Hispanic, if this had been a white guy in the same bodega, exact same situations, would Alvin Bragg have dropped the charges?

Now, this is why, Buck, justice is blind, right, because you should watch the video. We’re fortunate we have the video here ’cause there’s no way charges would have gotten dropped without video.

BUCK: If this had just happened and this was based on eyewitness testimony, they would have taken this all the way. They would have tried to suppress the fact that this assailant was a thug with a long-standing criminal record who had assaulted a police officer and was out on parole, they would have tried to suppress that his girlfriend started the fight, that his girlfriend came in and stabbed this guy afterward, that the police did not treat his wounds.

CLAY: That he came behind the counter and cornered him, there wouldn’t have been that video.

BUCK: I do hope that this may be a turning point, though, in the psychology of New Yorkers. This is my hometown. I’m sorry that it has been so overrun president woke. But I hope that Democrats not even just of good faith, of sane mind will say, “We have to actually have a society of order and rule of law or else it’s just not worth being here.”

CLAY: Which, to his credit, Eric Adams — and we kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier but I do think it’s important — came out almost immediately and said…

BUCK: Can you give him credit? It’s the most obvious thing in the world.

CLAY: I watched the video, and there are — Buck, we have to argue about masks every day, and it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

One of the challenges with Democrats right now is science and facts — I mean, when you say that a man can get pregnant, I mean, yeah, I’m a little bit surprised that even when you have the video there, that the Democrat mayor of New York City would say this shouldn’t have been charged. I mean, do you have confident that Bill de Blasio would have said it?

BUCK: That’s fair. No. Fair point. And I’d also say with Eric Adams, though, he was elected on, “I’m going to stop crime.” It would have been the end. I don’t think New York has a recall provision. But people would have wanted to recall this mayor already if he had said, yeah, this guy who’s just trying to do his job who’s attacked over nothing isn’t allowed to defend himself. You can’t be the “I’m going to be the law and order mayor” if that’s your position.

CLAY: No doubt. And I think that’s why it’s so significant as you break it forward and get everything ready.