During a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) spoke about the January 6th Insurrection.
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00:00Mr. Raskin for his opening statement. Thank you kindly Chairman Van Drew and for your opening
00:05statement. This week's events show how MAGA has turned American justice completely upside down
00:13and inside out. Over the last week we've been talking about a single rogue Doge employee
00:21who unilaterally canceled more than 500 million dollars in Department of Justice grants
00:29to local law enforcement and victims rights organizations and those assisting the victims
00:38of rape and sexual assault across the country. That's what right-wing policies do I would say to
00:44my friend the chair of the full committee. We tried to restore that money. Nobody seemed to know how
00:50any of this happened but our colleagues didn't utter a word against our amendment and yet they
00:56all voted against it. What else happened? Well a 33-year-old January 6 rioter who assaulted our
01:03police officers at the Capitol and he smashed the glass pane through which Ashley Babbitt climbed
01:10before she was fatally shot by a Capitol officer was arrested again yesterday. This time they got
01:17him for burglarizing neighbors homes. This was a guy who was pardoned by President Trump now robbing
01:24houses in Virginia. This is Zachary Alam was serving an eight-year sentence after a jury convicted him of
01:31seven criminal felonies and three misdemeanors when President Trump granted him clemency as part of the
01:38mass pardon of 1,600 insurrectionists and rioters for the thousands of crimes committed on that day.
01:46At sentencing U.S. District Court Judge Friedrich described the testimony of police who recalled Alam as
01:52quote, by far the loudest, most combative and most violent of the January 6 rioters who attacked the
02:00police in the part of the Capitol that these officers were defending. And yesterday the Trump
02:07Department of Justice agreed to pay nearly five million dollars to the family of Ashley Babbitt,
02:14the rioter who tried to storm the House Speaker's lobby on January 6 after she broke into the Capitol
02:22and after the aforementioned Mr. Alam broke that window. The Department of Justice originally took
02:29the position that her wrongful death lawsuit brought by her family was wholly without merit,
02:35no basis, and that Babbitt's civil rights had never been violated by the police, and that the police
02:41officer acted reasonably in defense of members of Congress and in defense of Vice President Pence.
02:48A Capitol Police investigation cleared the officer involved, saying his actions at the height of the
02:55riot, quote, potentially saved members and staff from serious injury and possible death from a large
03:02crowd of rioters who had forced their way into the Capitol, into the House chamber, where members and
03:08staff were steps away. In 2023, then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said, I think the police officer
03:16did his job. Now, although Trump's new attorney general is set to give five million dollars
03:22to the rioters' family, Trump has not proposed to give a penny to the more than 140 police officers
03:29injured, wounded, hospitalized, disfigured, and or disabled in their violence, and nothing to their
03:37families. He's proposed no money payments to the bereaved family of Officer Brian Sicknick, an Army
03:44veteran with two tours abroad who died at age 42 here on January 7th, 2021, the very next day after being
03:55brutalized by rioters. The decision to give millions of dollars to the Babbitt family and nothing to the
04:02families of the police officers who defended this Capitol, who defended us, exacerbates the insult of
04:10Speaker Johnson's continuing refusal to hang a simple plaque in honor of the officers who defended
04:17the Capitol and the Congress and the Vice President. A plaque mandated by law and now more than two years
04:24is overdue on the West Front of the Capitol. The Speaker's stubborn refusal to respect the law is
04:31craven submission to the executive branch, to Donald Trump, who wants to pretend that the rampaging mob
04:39that he sent to Congress was made up of patriotic heroes and that the people he pardoned were, quote,
04:46hostages and, quote, political prisoners. A hostage is someone who's been illegally abducted by a terrorist
04:54group like Hamas and held for a financial or political ransom. A political prisoner is someone
05:01like Alexei Navalny or Nelson Mandela who's been imprisoned for ideological reasons, not for violently
05:08assaulting the police or engaging in seditious conspiracy or destroying federal property. But the
05:16administration's effort to create big news yesterday was Trump's acting U.S. Attorney in New Jersey,
05:22a blatantly partisan prosecutor who has bragged about working to turn New Jersey red. Well, she announced
05:30her intention to indict our colleague, Congresswoman LaMonica McIver on charges of assaulting, resisting,
05:37and obstructing law enforcement based on the now-famous May 9th incident outside of Delaney Hall,
05:42an ICE detention facility in McIver's district, where she was conducting a scheduled oversight visit
05:50with other members of Congress, including our 80-year-old colleague, Bonnie Watson Coleman,
05:56and the mayor of Newark. Well, Delaney Hall is operated by the private prison company GEO, a major
06:02Republican donor that gave a million dollars to Make America Great Again, Inc., and has faced numerous
06:08lawsuits for its treatment of detainees and unsafe conditions. The members had a lawful right to be
06:15there and to investigate, and even after ICE initiated a scuffle to arrest the mayor of Newark
06:21on public property, the House members were let in to tour the facility to conduct nonviolent oversight,
06:29and the tour went smoothly. This indictment is a manifest fraud, clearly designed to distract America
06:36this week from the administration's savage and unpopular effort to strip 14 million Americans
06:43of their Medicaid and health coverage, and 11 million Americans of Head Start, Meals on Wheels,
06:49and other nutritional assistance programs like SNAP. Representative McIver was of course executing
06:55one of the core duties of a member of Congress, oversight, pursuant to her precise statutory right
07:02to enter and visit an ICE facility. The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that oversight is a central
07:09element of the legislative process, because if we can't research the facts on the ground, we don't know what
07:15laws to pass. This, for the Department of Justice to charge McIver with assault, is an outrage against
07:25the Constitution which protects members of Congress from civil and criminal prosecution for performance
07:31of their core legislative duties. It is also a scandal in light of the DOJ's constant backing of cop-beating
07:39insurrectionists, including with the shocking policy that these pardons can even apply to criminal
07:45charges wholly unrelated to the events of January 6th, as well as the DOJ's jaw-dropping decision to
07:53fire more than a dozen senior criminal prosecutors simply because they had worked on the January 6th case.
08:01Yet now we've got colleagues who celebrate January 6th insurrectionists actually calling for
08:08prosecution of members of the House for doing their jobs. Representative Buddy Carter called our
08:13colleagues rioters. Representative Bishop actually said this was an insurrection. I didn't know that
08:21was in his vocabulary, but this was an insurrection, and he said it was a debacle worse than 9-11. No police
08:28officers or ICE agents were injured at Delaney Hall. No one died. No one had a heart attack like Officer
08:34Fanone did. There were no strokes. There were no broken jaws, no broken necks. Nobody was forced out of
08:41police work like Sergeant Gunnell was. Yet we've got members of Congress who would gladly jettison
08:46the Speech and Debate Clause, which protects all of us in our work. The First Amendment and the Article
08:521 powers of Congress to score a few cheap political points at the expense of their own colleagues. In Trump
08:59world, violent insurrectionists and cop-beating extremists are heroes. They're martyrs. They're patriots.
09:05Members of Congress performing oversight functions are criminals and insurrectionists. And veteran
09:13criminal prosecutors of January 6 felons are fired. So Donald Trump can continue to pander to his private
09:20militia of pardon rioters and insurrectionists and a reserve army of extremists who've proven themselves
09:27willing to stand back and stand by. Let me show you what a real assault on police officers looks like.
09:33If you'd rule the team.
09:45Oh!
09:47Oh!
09:52Oh!
09:54Oh!
09:56Oh!
10:01Mr. Chairman, if this is an oversight hearing on ICE and ICE believes a real assault took place in New Jersey, where are they?
10:28Why are they not present today? The star of the show is absent, and that, my friends, is no oversight. I yield back.