During the House Judiciary Committee on the Southern Poverty Law Center, Democratic Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin didn't pull any punches. The indictment against the SPLC is weak on the merits. For example, paying bad actors for information isn't exactly "funding extremism."
So, Raskin took a minute to show what corruption actually looks like by rattling off the Trump Administration’s corruption and extremism.
"Todd Blanche wants to create a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund to turn the January 6th foot soldiers into mega millionaires," Raskin said. "And while Blanche was at it, he signed an outrageous super pardon to give not just Donald Trump but his entire family and all their businesses complete and total immunity from any investigation, audit, lawsuit, or prosecution by any federal agency for any criminal or civil violation against the United States up until this point."
æAnd while systematically firing prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the January 6th investigation, the largest criminal probe in American history, Trump and Blanche are putting January 6th rioters, violent extremists, and their closest allies in key positions throughout the DOJ," he continued. "Like Jared Wise, who urged rioters to kill police officers on January 6th. Like Ed Martin, who defended violent cop beaters, both as a defense attorney and a federal prosecutor."
"He's been given free rein now as the DOJ's pardon attorney, despite his long history of consorting with neo-Nazis," he said. "Donald Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia, three years out of law school, to run the Ethics Watchdog Office of the Special Counsel and stood by him after it was revealed that he admitted to having, quote, a bit of a Nazi streak in him. And he wrote that the Martin Luther King holiday should be tossed into the seventh circle of hell."
"The Department of Defense hired Elias Irizarry, an unqualified, inexperienced, 24-year-old Trump loyalist and convicted J6 rioter who was pardoned by the president to work on irregular warfare and counterterrorism," he continued. "And so on."
"We understand that the extremist swamp that gave rise to this criminal indictment against the SPLC is just one more Orwellian attack on the civil rights movement and one more Kafka-esque prosecution designed to shame and ensnare the righteous and acquit and absolve the guilty," he said. "It is a tissue of lies that will join the pantheon of debunked fraudulent prosecutions that DOJ has been excoriated for by dozens of judges across the land, appointed by all different presidents."
"A few weeks ago, a federal judge in Rhode Island, Judge McElroy, called the government's submissions in a case misleading, if not utterly false," he continued. "Another judge said that DOJ attorneys had submitted a patently false allegation to the court. Another judge rejected administration officials' testimony as disingenuous, squalid, and dishonorable."
"And another court found the administration had provided a highly misleading, if not intentionally false, sworn declaration so disingenuous that the court is left with little confidence that the United States can be trusted to tell the truth about anything," he added.
But Raskin wasn't done. The fraud at Trump University entered the chat:
More of this, please.
