Hamadeh goes to bat for infamous accused rapists Andrew and Tristan Tate

We’re all against rape, right? Can we all collectively agree that the act of choking a woman to the point of passing out and then having sex with her unconscious body — as manosphere chud Andrew Tate is accused of doing in the United Kingdom, among many other alleged offenses — is wrong?

Not so fast, says Arizona Rep. Abe Hamadeh.

On Monday, new details emerged about the many criminal charges facing Tate and his brother, Tristan Tate, in the U.K. The brothers, who are openly misogynistic influencers with regrettably huge followings on social media, face a total of 59 charges, including multiple counts of rape, sex trafficking, assault and “indecent images of a child and extreme pornography.” Andrew Tate faces the lion’s share of the charges, though Tristan Tate’s alleged crimes are just as serious. Per the New York Times, one woman told British authorities that Tristan Tate “regularly choked her to unconsciousness, gave her a black eye and whipped her with a belt on multiple occasions, causing welts and bruises.”

The brothers, who are being investigated for similar crimes in Romania, were arrested in Miami on Saturday and are being held in federal custody pending their extradition to the U.K. They have hired a law firm to fight that proceeding, and they seem to have an ally in Hamadeh, a MAGA Republican representing the West Valley.

Tuesday morning, Hamadeh tweeted in support of the Tate brothers. Calling upon his experience as a “former prosecutor” — Hamadeh spent a few years prosecuting low-level crimes with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office before his turn to politics — Hamadeh argued that the Tates should not be extradited at all.

“The Tate brothers are American citizens and so they deserve full American Constitutional protections — which means innocent until proven guilty,” Hamadeh wrote. “No American court has charged them with a crime despite years of false alarms and innuendos. They’ve been deplatformed, debanked, arrested, and still no convictions — something President Trump has endured for years.

“There should be no extradition of American citizens when the charges are unclear and political,” he continued. “The US government should either charge them with a crime or protect them from reckless court proceedings in the UK and Romania.”

Hamadeh’s office did not respond to questions from Phoenix New Times, but his characterization is at odds with a few facts. For one, the charges against the Tates are hardly “unclear”; they are actually quite specific. Additionally, both Tate brothers have dual citizenship in the U.S. and the U.K., and the two countries have had an extradition treaty since 2007 that allows those facing serious charges — like the Tate brothers — to be sent from one country to the other to face them. There are exclusions in that treaty for political prosecutions, but Durham Law School Associate Professor Gemma Davies told the BBC that it’s “very rare” for extradition to be refused on those grounds.

“It’s fairly common to extradite between the two, which means it’s well traversed from a legal perspective, and we are two countries that have fairly similar legal systems in terms of criminal justice,” Davies told the BBC.

Following Hamadeh’s argument to its logical conclusion takes us to a pretty absurd place. He argues that the federal government shouldn’t extradite the brothers unless they can be charged with a crime in the U.S. But the brothers have spent little time in the U.S. and haven’t committed alleged crimes here (that we know of), and the U.S. can’t try people for crimes committed elsewhere. And if the Tate brothers had committed crimes in the U.S., why would they be extradited to another country? They’d face those charges here.

It gets more ridiculous. At its core, Hamadeh’s argument suggests that American citizens should be able to commit crimes in foreign countries, even those with extradition treaties with the U.S., and get away with them so long as they return stateside before they can be arrested. It would also suggest that foreign nationals in the U.S. should be able to commit crimes here and evade justice if they can flee the country in time. Though it’d be surprising if Hamadeh dealt with any extradition cases as a low-level county prosecutor — the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office did not immediately respond to a question on the subject — that’d be an unorthodox take for any ex-prosecutor, much less one who is such a full-throated supporter of President Donald Trump and his mass deportation agenda.