A DC cop allegedly helped the Proud Boys. Why haven’t liberals in Washington done more about this?

Lamond’s indictment comes amid a season of scrutiny by local law enforcement in Washington. During House Oversight Committee hearings, lawmakers took turns lambasting city officials and the U.S. attorney for allegedly lenient policies on crime. For the first time in three decades, Congress also used its prerogative to strike down a duly enacted municipal law, reversing a rewrite of DC’s penal code.

For their part, DC officials have denounced congressional interference as undemocratic and bad-faith grandstanding, saying Congress should mind its own business and let Washingtonians run local affairs like other Americans.

Congressional agitation, however, has not focused on whether the city’s police department harbors a troubling number of insurgent sympathizers. Given the makeup of DC Hill’s leading critics, this is perhaps unsurprising: the leader of the effort to undo this penal code rewrite was Andrew Clyde, the Georgia congressman who once compared the Jan. 6 rioters at people making a “normal tourist visit” to the Capitol.

Instead, members took aim at another measure recently passed by the DC Council, a police accountability bill that codifies some of the reform policies put in place following the 2020 protests against police brutality. . Among other things, it’s the bill that finally orders the DC auditor’s study into white supremacist ties within the force. Congress also voted to overturn it.

Contrary to previous Congressional disapproval, however, President Joe Biden has vowed to veto the effort, meaning the mandatory inquiry will become law.

As far as I’m concerned, a real investigation can’t come a minute too soon. The very idea of ​​a small number of domestic extremists in the force should be terrifying — both to folks in the federal government in Washington worried about the security of national institutions and to folks in hometown DC who think that safe neighborhoods require citizens to feel able to cooperate with the police, something that is more difficult if there is even a slight suspicion that the officers may be part of a hate group.

“I’m surprised by Shane, but I’m not surprised by this culture because we’ve seen this in other departments across the country,” Donell Harvin, DC’s former head of Homeland Security, told me. Harvin used to meet with Lamond weekly and says the allegation of alerting Tarrio to his arrest – if true – is way over the line. “I know men and women in the DC Police Department and they are dedicated to their work. But we absolutely have to study this. Congress should commission a study.