On Friday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) spoke about President Trump's DOJ speech and made claims of rising authoritarianism in the U.S.
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NewsTranscript
00:00All right, well, welcome and thank you all for coming.
00:11The tirade we just witnessed is one more grim landmark in the spreading authoritarianism
00:16of this administration, and it is a brand new embarrassment to the once revered Department
00:24of Justice.
00:26It's fascinating that the president used the word BS to describe the case against him,
00:33which resulted in dozens of criminal convictions, because that was the same word that his own
00:39attorney general, William Barr, used to describe his deranged claim that he had won the 2020
00:45presidential election when Joe Biden beat him by more than 7 million votes, 306 to 232
00:51in the Electoral College.
00:52That was the word that Attorney General Barr, even one of his greatest defenders, used to
00:58describe his delusional claims about how there was election fraud and election irregularities.
01:05No other president in American history has stood at the Department of Justice to proclaim
01:10an agenda of criminal prosecution and retaliation against his political foes.
01:18This thoroughly partisan and delusional diatribe was a staggering violation of the traditional
01:25boundary between independent criminal law enforcement and presidential political power.
01:32The speak we just witnessed is a desecration of the essential values of the storied department
01:38in every way.
01:40It's an insult to the thousands of professional lawyers who go to work at the Department of
01:45Justice every day to enforce the rule of law, not the personal vendettas and partisan
01:52games of a politician.
01:56President Grant and Congress created the Department of Justice in 1870, five years after the Civil
02:01War, in the throes of Reconstruction.
02:04It was an exercise of Congress's powers under Section 5 of the 14th Amendment, which had
02:09just been added to the Constitution two years before.
02:12The purpose of the department was to protect the newly freed African American population
02:17in the South against escalating violence by the Ku Klux Klan and unrepentant secessionists.
02:25Congress wanted to protect the voting rights of the emancipated population against racial
02:31disenfranchisement schemes.
02:32Now the Department of Justice, which first set out to defend the rule of law against
02:38white supremacy and vigilante violence, has become a department of injustice, cruelty,
02:45favoritism, and unfairness.
02:47One of Trump's first acts was to try to nullify the very first sentence of the 14th Amendment,
02:53which establishes that all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject
02:58to the jurisdiction thereof is a citizen of the United States.
03:02And they tried to destroy that, leading to at least four federal courts invalidating
03:08this executive order, an Obama judge, a Biden judge, a Reagan judge, and even a Trump judge.
03:15And the Reagan judge said it was the easiest case he ever had to decide.
03:19You don't have to be a lawyer to know what's wrong with that executive order or any of
03:23the other ones.
03:24You just have to know how to read.
03:26And that judge was very clear about it.
03:28Now until now, the basic concept of the rule of law in our history has been the idea that
03:33no one is above the law.
03:35There was, to be sure, law under King George, but it was a law that the monarch and the
03:41lords imposed on the rabble, the peasants and the poor.
03:45But it never applied to them, never applied to themselves.
03:49In the 18th century, the American Revolution overthrew the kings, the lords, and the feudal
03:54barons to establish a nation where we would have a nation where all would be equal under
04:01the law.
04:02As Tom Paine put it, in the monarchies, the king is law, but in the democracies, the law
04:09is king.
04:10But amazingly, we now have a president in the 21st century who believes he's a king,
04:16and he believes that the king is the law once again.
04:19The first seven weeks of this radical experiment in neo-monarchism has been a disaster for
04:25the rule of law, and for the Constitution, and for the First Amendment.
04:30There have been 120 federal cases filed against Donald Trump all over the country, and he
04:38has lost already in more than 40 courtrooms across the land where temporary restraining
04:46orders and preliminary injunctions have been issued against his lawless attack on the Constitution.
04:55This Department of Justice started out by empowering law enforcement.
05:02The original Department of Justice started out by empowering law enforcement against
05:06insurrectionists and extremists.
05:10This DOJ started out by empowering insurrectionists and extremists against law enforcement.
05:22President pardon, I'm sure you think so, because President Trump pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists.
05:34All right, President Trump pardoned more than 1,500 insurrectionists, hundreds of whom
05:46were extremists who violently assaulted our police officers with stun guns, chemical spray,
05:55batons, broken furniture, fire extinguishers, and Trump flags.
06:05This Department of Injustice has gone even further, and maybe he's got a pardon, that's
06:11why he's so excited today, I don't know.
06:14But this Department of Injustice has worked aggressively to get courts to dismiss unrelated
06:22criminal charges against pardoned January 6th convicts.
06:28There are people who were pardoned on January 6th who have had cocaine charges, well, there
06:40are January 6th felons who've had cocaine charges, drug charges, gun charges, sawed-off
06:46shotgun charges, hand grenade charges against them, dismissed by this Department of Justice,
06:54and that was never covered by the original pardon.
06:57At Trump's Department of Justice, law and order means Trump will twist the law for you
07:03if you take orders from him, and that's, of course, what they did with Mayor Adams.
07:09And maybe I'll take a break here, and I'll have something to say at the end about the
07:13Adams prosecution and the other people who've been let go as they've barreled through a
07:18pro-corruption agenda at the Department of Justice.
07:23But let me say this, Donald Trump has sacked more than a dozen of D.C.'s best career criminal
07:31prosecutors because they worked to successfully convict January 6th insurrectionists.
07:40Many of them members of extremist groups and violent street gangs.
07:48This makes no sense.
07:50They're firing the best criminal prosecutors in Washington because they did their jobs
07:56against people like him.
07:58Congratulations, buddy.
08:00That's how the Nazis got started.
08:02You go have your own rally, all right?
08:08All right, now, I would now like to go to our originally scheduled program, if this
08:19gentleman would allow us to.
08:22I'm introducing Sean Brennan.
08:27I'm introducing Sean Brennan, who's a former assistant United States attorney, a prosecutor
08:35in the U.S. attorney's office in the Capitol siege section, who was fired by that man's
08:40hero Donald Trump because he prosecuted January 6th insurrections.
08:46Please welcome Sean Brennan.
08:48We'll take questions after, and I'll call on people.
08:50You go interview that guy, all right?