Wittman Truth Files #6: Crime and public safety

Rob Wittman co-sponsored the “Back the Blue Act,” then said nothing as the people who beat 140 police officers walked free.

Welcome back to WTF: the Wittman Truth Files. We’ve opened the affordability file, the jobs-and-economy file, the healthcare file, the earned-benefits file, and the immigration file. This week we open the crime-and-public-safety file, where we find a familiar Wittman pattern: tough talk for the cameras, and a voting record that undercuts the very same things he says he supports.

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Donald Trump, Rob Wittman, and their cronies insist that America is a hellscape of crime, with cities overrun with “illegals” inflicting all manner of horrors on honest, fearful citizens. This is demonstrably false. Crime in America is falling, fast. The FBI’s 2024 numbers show violent crime down 4.5% and murder down 14.9% — the lowest violent- and property-crime rates since the 1960s. Property crime fell 8.1%, and motor-vehicle theft dropped 18.6%. It’s the second straight year of historic declines, and homicides kept falling into 2025 to the lowest level in a decade. Whatever you’ve been told about a crime “wave,” the data says the opposite.

You might think Rob Wittman has been making VA-01 safer. But he hasn’t – quite the opposite, in fact.

The “Back the Blue” gap

Let’s look at Wittman’s most glaring hypocrisy on crime and public safety. In 2022, he co-sponsored the House Back the Blue Act, a bill that would carry a mandatory minimum prison sentence for the federal crime of assaulting a law-enforcement officer. The bill never became law, though it was reintroduced in several subsequent sessions of Congress.

On January 20, 2025, Donald Trump pardoned roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants, including more than 600 convicted of assaulting or obstructing police and 170 who used a deadly weapon. About 140 officers were injured that day — beaten with poles and attacked with bear spray in one of the largest mass assaults on police in U.S. history. Trump also freed the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders who had been convicted of seditious conspiracy. The Fraternal Order of Police — the nation’s largest police union, which had endorsed Trump three times — joined the national police chiefs’ association in condemning the pardons. Republican senators from Thom Tillis to Susan Collins said the same.

And from Wittman, our Back the Blue co-sponsor? Silence. No statement for the officers. No daylight between him and Trump. A man who wanted mandatory prison time for anyone who lays a hand on a cop went quiet the day his party’s leader handed get-out-of-jail-free cards to hundreds of convicted criminals who did exactly that. And by June 2026, at least 97 of those pardoned had been arrested again on new charges. WTF, Rob?

Defunding the cops — and the victims — he claims to back

The government provides funding to law enforcement agencies nationwide via grants. Three months into the new administration, the Justice Department abruptly cancelled about 365 grants worth roughly $811 million. This was money already promised to police departments, victim services, and crime-prevention programs in red and blue communities across 37 states. More than half a billion dollars came straight out of the office that helps fund local law enforcement, the small and rural departments that are most dependent on federal dollars.

Among the casualties: gun-violence prevention, crime-victim advocacy, domestic-violence shelters, anti-trafficking work, opioid response, and community violence-intervention programs — roughly $169 million for community-safety and violence-reduction work alone. One Minnesota high school lost a grant called “Stop the Violence.” These are the programs the FBI and criminologists credit for the historic drop in crime. Cutting these programs mid-stream, as the murder rate hits a generational low and validates their efficacy, is the opposite of public safety.

The administration called the grants “wasteful.” Wittman, who never tires of claiming to back the blue, didn’t lift a finger to restore a dime, even as the same budget math threatened domestic-violence and victim funding for survivors here in Virginia. Wittman’s “Back the Blue” sloganeering did not, and will never, result in real support for law enforcement officers and crime victims.

Guns: the votes behind the rhetoric

Wittman calls himself a gun owner and Second Amendment defender, and he’s endorsed by the Russia-linked NRA. Here’s why:

• He voted no on the Bipartisan Background Checks Act, which would require a background check on nearly every gun sale.

• He voted no on the Assault Weapons Ban of 2022.

• He voted no on the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act — the post-Uvalde law, backed by major law-enforcement groups, that expanded background checks for buyers under 21, closed the “boyfriend loophole,” and funded the same violence-intervention programs that helped push gun crime down.

The gap between his words and his votes shows plainly. Days after the back-to-back El Paso and Dayton massacres of August 2019, Wittman told constituents he supported strengthening the background-check system — though he’d already voted against two such bills the prior February. And when the Bipartisan Background Checks Act returned to the House floor in 2021, he voted no again. Reassuring words after a tragedy; the NRA vote when it counted. It’s the entire WTF pattern in miniature.

Fentanyl: defunding the cure, then taking the credit

No issue exposes the gap between Wittman’s posture and the actual results like fentanyl. Virginia just posted one of the greatest public-health turnarounds in the country. Opioid-overdose deaths fell 44% from 2023 to 2024 — the steepest drop of any state — and total overdose deaths fell from 1,548 in 2024 to a preliminary 1,196 in 2025. Even Governor Youngkin celebrated a nearly 59% cut in fentanyl deaths since 2022.

What is responsible for the dramatic improvement? Not a Wittman slogan, that’s for sure. It was naloxone in hundreds of thousands of hands, expanded addiction treatment, and — above all — the Medicaid coverage that pays for it. These are the same drivers the CDC credits nationwide. Treatment and harm reduction saved the lives of your neighbors.

So what did Wittman do? He backed the enforcement theater — the HALT Fentanyl Act, the border bill we also mentioned in WTF #5 — then voted for the billionaire-giveaway budget that guts Medicaid, the single largest payer for addiction treatment in America, while the same DOJ purge clawed back opioid-response grants on top of it. Virginia health officials now warn the cuts could reverse the progress and send the death toll climbing again. While portraying the improved situation as a feat of his representation, Wittman is defunding the programs that make the improvements possible.

What it costs VA-01

Strip away the ads and the record is consistent: Rob Wittman votes against the very things that reduce crime — background checks, violence-intervention grants, victim services, Medicaid-funded treatment — and then campaigns on the fear those programs were quietly putting to rest. He could restore the grants, protect addiction treatment, and back universal background checks tomorrow. He won’t — because a frightened, anxious voter is easier to win than a voter who feels safe and protected. Here’s what that costs you:

If you back the blue, your small-town police department just lost federal grants your congressman won’t fight to restore.

If you’re a crime victim or a survivor of domestic violence, the services you’d turn to are on the chopping block.

If you’ve worried about losing a loved one to fentanyl, you must expect more opioid deaths in a reversal of Virginia’s record turnaround — which relied on treatments that are now threatened by Wittman’s votes to cut Medicaid.

And if you simply want a safe neighborhood, crime is already near a 60-year low — thanks to the programs Wittman keeps defunding.

The next time Wittman tells a sheriff’s association he “backs the blue,” ask him why he was silent on the January 6 pardons, and why he keeps voting to defund the programs that are proven to reduce crime and opioid deaths. You can call his Glen Allen, Yorktown, or DC office, show up at his next staff-only mobile office hours, and remind him whose neighborhoods these are.

The seventh Wittman Truth File will be opened next week.

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The Wittman Truth Files (WTF) is a weekly series profiling the gap between Rep. Rob Wittman’s public claims and his voting record.

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