Speaker Johnson decries the legal troubles of former President Trump.
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Thank you to Leader Scalise and all my colleagues. Thank you all for being here. It's a big day on Capitol Hill. I've passed the six-month mark serving as Speaker of the House.
00:13 And part of the job of the Speaker is to go all around the country and meet with Americans and hear from Americans and engage what their greatest concerns are.
00:23 And so in the last six months, we've calculated it over the weekend, I've been to more than 100 cities in more than half the state.
00:30 It doesn't matter where I am, whether I'm out west or Manhattan or the deep south or the midwest, it doesn't matter. The concerns are the same.
00:39 The people of this country are deeply concerned about the border catastrophe, the open border that was orchestrated by the Biden administration.
00:46 They're deeply concerned about the rising cost of living, about rising crime around the country.
00:53 They're very deeply concerned about the weakness that we're projecting on the world stage that is encouraging our adversaries to act so provocatively and ramp up hot wars around the globe.
01:03 And you know what the other thing is that they're really concerned about? They're deeply concerned about the institutions of government itself.
01:11 And we need to keep steady hands on the wheel here and keep the legislative branch moving and operating in the best interest of the people.
01:19 And that's a heavy task when we have divided government as we do and the smallest majority in U.S. history, famously, and everybody knows.
01:26 But one of the things that is also in jeopardy right now is our judicial branch and it's our system of government itself.
01:34 And I don't think we can say often enough here how much that has been abused under this administration and with local prosecutors, state prosecutors, and at the federal level.
01:45 We're using lawfare, we're using our judicial system to go after political opponents.
01:50 The most obvious example of that, and I think the most egregious one in history, is what is being done to Donald Trump right now.
01:56 This is yet another week where cable TV has a split screen image, right?
02:00 On one side, turn on any news station, you see the partisan prosecutors and the double standard DOJ going after President Trump.
02:07 And on the other side, college campuses being wrecked by anti-Semitic mobs.
02:12 In Manhattan, in the New York case, I mean it's play by play on all the stations, right?
02:16 That case should never have been brought.
02:19 If there's ever been an example of lawfare, everybody can look at that and see.
02:24 The trial is being orchestrated by Democrat supporters of President Biden who are trying to make a name for themselves.
02:29 I mean, they're pretty open about that. They used it in their campaign footage.
02:33 We've got a Democrat district attorney, a Biden donor judge, whose daughter is a Democratic political consultant and has clients that use the case in their solicitation emails to raise money.
02:45 And now we've learned there's an assistant DA who was recently a top man at the DOJ and received over $10,000 in payments from the Democratic National Committee.
02:56 This is all wrong. It doesn't matter what political party you're in. You have to look at this.
03:01 If you look at this objectively, you know, you know deep down that this is wrong.
03:05 And think about all this in the context of New York.
03:09 Assaults in New York are at their highest level ever. Crime is through the roof.
03:14 The DA has decided to bring an eight-year-old bookkeeping charge that rests on the testimony of a long-proven liar and perjurer.
03:23 And the judge, who is a well-known Democrat, is pursuing an indefensible gag order on President Trump.
03:29 Now just think about that. Think about the magnitude of that.
03:34 He's trying to override President Trump's constitutional right to defend himself against the constant smears of his political opponents in an election year.
03:43 But not just any election year. The election year that most everyone understands is the most fateful one of our lifetime.
03:49 You cannot call yourself a serious judge and threaten a presidential candidate with jail time when he defends his reputation in public in the middle of a campaign.
03:58 And I think everybody of good conscience understands that.
04:01 Then we have the classified documents case where President Trump is being treated completely differently from President Biden.
04:08 Again, this is something that is just obvious that everybody can see.
04:11 Biden, of course, willfully retained the disclosed classified material.
04:15 But because he is "an elderly man with a poor memory," it was decided the DOJ would not be bringing charges.
04:24 What the American people see, and I mean this is across the country, this isn't just red states, this is blue states as well,
04:29 they look at this and they see an incredible double standard. It's just blatantly on display.
04:34 It's the weaponization of our justice system.
04:36 Every single person of good conscience and common sense can see that clearly.
04:40 And it's disturbing to them. Why?
04:42 Because in our system, in a constitutional republic, if the people do not believe that the justice system is fair,
04:49 that you really do have equal justice under law, then they throw their hands up and say, "What is there to believe in?"
04:54 It's critical. It's a foundational component of maintaining a republic.
04:59 And they are jeopardizing this for political purposes.
05:02 Now we're learning that the prosecutors in the Jack Smith case have even engaged in evidence tampering during the raid at Mar-a-Lago.
05:09 But here's the point. The entire case turns on what happened with those documents.
05:13 And Jack Smith has admitted that things were not as they should be with the boxes.
05:17 It just raises very serious questions.
05:20 These cases are a coordinated political attack, plain and simple.
05:24 They are a clear attempt to keep Donald Trump in the courtroom and off the campaign trail.
05:28 That's what this is. It's an election interference.
05:32 It is borderline criminal conspiracy. And the American people see right through it.
05:36 President Trump has done nothing wrong here, and he continues to be the target of endless lawfare.
05:41 It has to stop.
05:43 And you're going to see the United States Congress address this in every possible way that we can,
05:46 because we need accountability, ultimately, at the end of the day.
05:49 It's bigger than President Trump.
05:51 It's about the people's faith in our system of justice.
05:54 And we're going to get down to the bottom of it.
05:56 All these cases need to be dropped because they are a threat to our entire system.
06:00 On these other issues...