A state judge just nixed a Columbia board’s discipline of the “pro-Palestine” students who occupied and trashed Hamilton Hall two years ago, completing the university’s elaborate dance with Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg to ensure the goons would suffer no consequences for their noxious actions.
Bragg’s office dropped charges against the students back in June 2024, citing its “understanding that the students would be subject to Columbia’s internal disciplinary proceedings.”
The school then took a year to actually deliver on that “understanding,” albeit with little more than wrist-slaps — whereupon the snowflakes sued to reverse this “oppression.”
And on Tuesday, a state judge threw out the rulings of the disciplinary board, inventing an absurd Catch-22 to protect the vandals.
You see, Columbia used the students’ arrest records to prove they took over Hamilton Hall and caused major damage — but the judge insists that evidence is no good because the records were subsequently sealed.
Talk about collusion: The DA’s Office did nothing to stop the arrest records from being sealed, no matter that the school might need them to discipline the students who rioted, took over Hamilton Hall, beat up two janitors and seriously vandalized the building.
Columbia didn’t try to keep the records unsealed, either.
The university, sniffs Judge Gerald Lebovits, can restart the discipline proceedings; it just can’t use the NYPD’s list of who was arrested.
But the occupiers were masked and covered up the security cameras inside Hamilton Hall, so there’s no other way to ID the culprits.
This reeks: It’s obvious that no one in authority here — from Bragg to Columbia’s leaders to Judge Lebovits, who is a professor at Columbia — really wanted these rioters to face any consequences for their actions.
How else to explain why they keep passing the buck back and forth?
So a bunch of spoiled brats who terrorized Morningside Heights for months, setting up encampments and harassing Jewish students before occupying a university building, are laughing as they walk away.
What lessons will they learn? That in New York you can pretty much do whatever you want, if you also shout “Free Palestine!” or some other leftist shibboleth.
Just don’t dare to defend yourself or others from a deranged individual threatening violence: Bragg calls that “vigilante justice” and enforces a zero-tolerance policy.
But for everyone else in Manhattan, from leftist radical rioters to thugs chucking “snowballs” at cops to street criminals, Alvin Bragg has a ticket for you stamped “Get out of jail free.”
