- South Dakota’s attorney general is facing impeachment and requests to resign.
- AG Jason Ravnsborg was charged with three minor offenses in connection with a fatal car accident.
- New details have since emerged with the victim’s glasses found in Ravnsborg’s car.
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South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg is facing impeachment and is calling for his resignation on criminal charges in connection with a fatal accident.
Ravnsborg was charged with three misdemeanors last week, after initially saying that he thought he hit a deer, not a person. Pressure for his expulsion increased on Wednesday when it became public that the victim’s glasses were found in Ravnsborg’s car.
“His face was on your windshield, Jason. Think about it,” a detective told the AG in an interrogation on September 30, whose video was released on Tuesday.
The video came from South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who asked Ravnsborg to resign earlier in the day. Republicans in the state legislature also filed for impeachment on Tuesday.
On Thursday, Noem promised that he would release more documents around the investigation, and the Republican mayor outlined the next steps for impeachment, which include forming a committee of ten lawmakers to investigate whether the conduct constitutes an impeachment offense. .
Notably, Noem and the lawmakers who filed the impeachment articles are fellow Republicans, with Ravnsborg elected to office in 2018 after securing his nomination at the South Dakota Republican Party convention.
Research materials released in the past few days cast doubt on Ravnsborg’s early history. The phone records show that he logged into a Yahoo email account and visited news sites minutes before calling 911, according to a compilation of the Argiou Leader newspaper in Sioux Falls.
After leaving a meeting to announce the impeachment articles on Tuesday, Republican state deputy Will Mortenson de Pierre said the attorney general should not go to prison, but needs to be held accountable.
“This is not political and it is not personal,” said Mortenson. “Again, I do not believe that Attorney General Ravnsborg belongs to the prison, but I know that he no longer belongs to the Attorney General’s Office.”