During Friday's press conference, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) discussed President Trump's DOJ agenda.
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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.
03:18You 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.