'Classic Donald Trump stuff': Jamie Raskin mocks president's 'rambling'

Amy Goodman
and
Democracy Now
17 March
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President Donald Trump spoke at the Department of Justice Friday in an unprecedented speech in which he threatened to take revenge on his political enemies, from the press to the FBI itself. “It was a typical rambling and hate-filled diatribe,” says Maryland Congressmember Jamie Raskin. “Nobody has ever taken a sledgehammer to the traditional boundary between independent criminal law enforcement, on the one side, and presidential political will and power, on the other.” Raskin, who spoke at a press conference in response to Trump’s address outside of the Department of Justice, is a former constitutional law professor and served as the Democrats’ lead prosecutor for Trump’s second impeachment over the January 6 Capitol insurrection. He also responds to Trump’s “illegal” invocation of the wartime Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and his attempt to deport foreign-born university students and faculty. Trump’s sweeping efforts to make the United States hostile to immigrants “creates danger for everybody,” warns Raskin. Finally, Raskin responds to recent divisions within the Democratic Party over a GOP spending bill. He urges congressional Democrats to present a “unified plan” and “common strategy” for resisting a Republican supermajority loyal to Trump.



This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: The United States is moving closer to a constitutional crisis as the Trump administration refuses multiple court orders while the president vows to take revenge on political enemies and escalates his attack on the press.

On Saturday, the U.S. deported 137 Venezuelan immigrants to El Salvador after President Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which was last used to justify the arrest and internment of 30,000 Japanese, German and Italian nationals during World War II.

Meanwhile, Columbia student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil remains locked up in an ICE jail in Louisiana for taking part in student protests against Israel’s war on Gaza. A second Columbia student protester has also been arrested.

On Friday, President Trump spoke at the Department of Justice and threatened to take revenge on his political enemies.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the department of injustice. But I stand before you today to declare that those days are over, and they are never going to come back. They’re never coming back. … So, now as the chief law enforcement officer in our country, I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.

AMY GOODMAN: In a moment, we’ll be joined by Democratic Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, but first let’s turn to a part of his response to Trump’s speech. Raskin spoke outside the Department of Justice Friday.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: In the 18th century, the American Revolution overthrew the kings, the lords and the feudal barons to establish a nation where we would have a nation where all would be equal under the law. As Tom Paine put it, in monarchies, the king is law, but in the democracies, the law is king. But, amazingly, we now have a president in the 21st century who believes he’s a king, and he believes that the king is the law once again.
The first seven weeks of this radical experiment in neomonarchism has been a disaster for the rule of law and for the Constitution and for the First Amendment. There have been 120 federal cases filed against Donald Trump all over the country, and he has lost already in more than 40 courtrooms across the land, where temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions have been issued against his lawless attack on the Constitution.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland speaking outside the DOJ on Friday, responding to Trump’s speech. He’s joining us now from Takoma Park, Maryland. Congressmember Raskin is the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and a former constitutional law professor.

During Trump’s first presidency, Raskin served as a floor manager and the Democrats’ lead prosecutor for Trump’s second impeachment after the January 6th Capitol insurrection. He was also a member of the House January 6 committee investigating the Capitol insurrection. In January, Biden gave preemptive pardons to Raskin and other members of the January 6th House committee. Earlier today, President Trump claimed the pardons are invalid because, he said, they were done by autopen.

Congressmember Jamie Raskin, welcome back to Democracy Now! Why don’t we start there, with President Trump saying all the pardons that he issued that were done by autopen are invalid? That would include you. Your response?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: First of all, thank you for having me, Amy, and that was the first time I got to hear a clip from our press conference. What you couldn’t hear there was the constant berating and heckling of MAGA counterprotesters who showed up. We were being drowned out by a guy with a bullhorn. I wanted to borrow his bullhorn, because we didn’t have a sound system with us. But I appreciate your running that clip where we went and appeared opposite Donald Trump.

So, but I had not seen that Donald Trump is claiming that the pardon rendered by President Biden was somehow illegitimate because of the kind of pen that was used. This sounds like classic Donald Trump stuff. You know, the pardons, of course, were necessary because of Trump’s promises to prosecute Bennie Thompson and Liz Cheney, less so the rest of us, but they had already made their moves against Liz Cheney. And I have no reason to think that those were not valid any more than the humiliating and atrocious pardons that Donald Trump gave to nearly 1,600 insurrectionists, including violent felons who viciously attacked our police officers on January 6th.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about this almost unprecedented speech? It is very rare for a president to go to the Department of Justice and give a speech like this. I think Clinton did around some anti-crime bill, which many would dispute was actually an anti-crime bill. Obama went to say goodbye to the attorney general. But to give an hour address naming names of targets, talking about the press as enemies of the people, if you can respond, overall, to what he said?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, it was a typical rambling and hate-filled diatribe by Donald Trump. No speech like that has ever taken place at the U.S. Department of Justice, which has existed since 1870, when it was set up to try to enforce the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution against the Ku Klux Klan and against white supremacists and insurrectionists and secessionists.

But nobody has ever taken a sledgehammer to the traditional boundary between independent criminal law enforcement, on the one side, and presidential political will and power, on the other. But here Trump made it clear that he views these people as his lawyers. They are reporting to him, according to his corrupt unitary executive theory. And far from staying out of the business of deciding who will be prosecuted and who will be let go, he’s going to superintend the whole machinery of the Department of Justice.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go to a clip from President Trump speaking at the Department of Justice.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I believe that CNN and MSDNC, who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they’re really corrupt, and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal. … These networks and these newspapers are really no different than a highly paid political operative. And it has to stop. It has to be illegal. It’s influencing judges, and it’s entered — it’s really changing law, and it just cannot be legal. I don’t believe it’s legal.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that is President Trump speaking at the Justice Department. Of course, he has sued ABC. He has sued CBS. He has sued The Des Moines Register. Because he has the backing of the wealthiest person on Earth, Elon Musk, he could do endless lawsuits. And whether or not they win, that’s not the point. But he could just wipe out one news institution after another, Congressmember Raskin.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, he’s obviously frustrated because he’s losing everywhere in court on everything from the birthright citizenship executive order, which is blatantly unconstitutional, to the spending freeze to the sacking of thousands of probationary employees. And so, he’s frustrated, so he says it’s got to be illegal for the media to be covering his defeats and to be trying to expose the various constitutional violations of his administration. Of course, it’s completely lawful and protected by the First Amendment.

And he’s just operating out of the authoritarian playbook, which says that the first thing you do when you get in is you crack down on the free press. And he’s been doing that in numerous ways. He’s been ordering the FCC to go after ABC, CBS, NBC, anybody who displeases him in any way. But he’s also been personally suing media entities. There was a shakedown of $15 million against ABC because he was unhappy with coverage there. And now he’s got a $20 billion lawsuit against CBS, not even because of anything they said about him, but because he thought that the coverage of Kamala Harris was too positive.

AMY GOODMAN: It was about, right, a 60 Minutes interview, which in all news media you do an hour an interview, and you play 10 minutes, so things like her sneezing were taken out. And he said that was used to affect the — try to use to affect the election.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Of course, Fox News operates completely as an ideological arm of the Republican Party and of the Trump cult, and there’s nothing unconstitutional about that. You know, it’s totally fine for a newspaper entity to be endorsing Harris or Trump or what have you. So, he’s just absolutely confused on the point.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the naming of names, everyone from, oh, Norm Eisen to the organization CREW, that sues over corruption in government, to the Democratic lawyer Marc Elias to the prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, Pomerantz who worked for Alvin Bragg. He named him, as well, the Manhattan DA. What it means for the president of the United States to name check these people and talk about going after them?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, Trump has embarked upon exceedingly unpopular policy moves, including, you know, an $888 billion cut to Medicaid, increasing the tax on Social Security, coming from Elon Musk, gutting federal departments and agencies promoting environmental protection, promoting health research, promoting anti-disease campaigns. And so, the only way to try to protect these maneuvers is to shut down a free press and disable the lawyers who are in court every day holding them to account.

And understand, Amy, we are winning in court every single day against the lawlessness, most recently against this completely illegal move to deport people outside of the provisions of immigration law by invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which requires that America be at war or be in the midst of an invasion. And we are not being invaded, and the Congress of the United States, which I have the privilege of serving in, has not declared war on Venezuela.

AMY GOODMAN: So, let’s go into that, Trump invoking that 18th-century law in order to deport Venezuelan nationals from the United States. On Saturday, they flew, the Trump administration, more than 260 immigrants, including 130 people accused, but not convicted, of being a member of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, which Trump has labeled a terrorist organization. The flights came despite a temporary restraining order from U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, who ordered any of these deportation flights that were currently in the air to be turned around. One of them was still on the ground. The Washington Postreports the three flights bound for El Salvador arrived after the judge’s order. It looks like Salvador, this maximum-security prison, which is ultimately run by the Trump ally Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, guilty of mass human rights abuses — it looks like this judge is holding a hearing today about why they disregarded his ruling. Can you talk about the significance of this? The same thing happened with the Brown University professor, the kidney doctor, who was sent back despite the judge ruling she should be allowed to at least be — her case be heard, and she should not be deported.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: James Boasberg is an excellent judge in the District of Columbia, federal judge. He’s also very conservative. And this is a pattern we note now, that it goes across Democratic and Republican appointees. The same with a bunch of prosecutors who have resigned rather than participate in a corrupt scheme like the effort to absolve and exculpate Mayor Adams.

But Boasberg’s order was completely flouted and violated by the Trump administration and by the president of El Salvador, who gloated and basically mocked the judicial order online, saying, “Oopsie… Too late.” And I think that was retweeted by — I think it was Elon Musk who retweeted it with some glee. But, look, you’re messing with federal court judges who intervene in a situation like this only when they believe there is imminent harm to people being threatened and when they think that there is a probable likelihood of success on the merits of the case. And I think it was shown, to his satisfaction, that there was all kinds of imminent harm being threatened by these deportations outside of the immigration law system that we’ve got by invoking the Alien Enemies Act from 1798, which was last used during World War II to round up Japanese and Japanese American citizens in the internment.

And so, I don’t know. It will be very interesting to see what Judge Boasberg does at this point, because as the president of El Salvador, the corrupt and human rights-violating president of El Salvador, said, “Oopsie… Too late,” when it was very clear they had the order to bring those people back and let them go through the normal process. We have no idea who was part of the contingent being deported.

AMY GOODMAN: And Rubio, the secretary of state, retweeted the “Oopsie.” Now I want to ask you about Mahmoud Khalil. There have been mass protests across the country for this Palestinian graduate student who was here on a green card — his wife, eight months pregnant, she is a U.S. citizen — to be released. Can you talk about what’s happened to him? He’s now still in Louisiana ICE detention. What you’re calling for?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, we’re calling for respect for the rule of law and for the First Amendment and for due process, and nothing more than that. I would hope, I would assume that people who support the freedom of speech and due process would be saying this is a completely unacceptable situation.

First of all, when he was picked up, they were saying that he had a student visa, which he did not. He’s a permanent resident, a green card holder, who has all of the same First Amendment rights that a U.S. citizen has. And so, you can disagree with his speech; you can agree with his speech. But in any event, he was picked up for his speech, not given due process under our immigration law system, and then deported and taken out of state. And that’s just an intolerable situation.

And if it can be done to him, it can be done to every other permanent resident. And indeed, because he’s never been charged with anything, there have never been criminal charges, and he’s not being charged with anything now, it creates danger for everybody, both noncitizens and citizens alike. And, of course, that’s the history of this, Amy. If you go back to the Alien and Sedition Acts from the 1790s, Thomas Jefferson was able to observe, along with other people who were the targets of the Alien and Sedition Acts, that the attack on immigrants very quickly becomes an attack on citizens, as the incumbent party thinks that they’re absolutely invulnerable and they can jail people and prosecute people just for being in the political opposition.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can you talk about some of the things you’re calling for, calling on people to submit an open records request to DOGE for your own data, for people’s own data, to see what they have on you, like Social Security, student loans, etc., the meaning of this? And your overall, as a constitutional lawyer — the role of the richest man on Earth, of Elon Musk, firing thousands of people, using his own social media platform X to do this? What role does he have in the U.S. government?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, we don’t know exactly what role he has. That’s an excellent question, because they’re very slippery and elusive about this. Sometimes the president describes him as the head of DOGE, as the leader of DOGE. In court, they’ve said he’s not involved in an administrative capacity with DOGE; he’s just an adviser to the president. So we’d like to know.

We did get this victory in court last week, where a federal judge determined that DOGE is a federal agency, and they cannot slime away from that reality. It is a federal agency. That means that they are subject to FOIA and to the Privacy Act.

And I immediately sent in a request for all of the private records of mine, private data of mine, that DOGE has. And under FOIA and under the Privacy Act, we all have that right to find out what information they’ve got from Social Security, from the Department of Education, if there’s college loans, if there’s military service. Whatever it might be, all of that belongs to the people since the Privacy Act of 1974. So, I sent it in. I put it up online. I think more than 8,000 or 10,000 people have followed. And we’re going to launch a campaign this week, because more than 300 million people have that right, and people need to understand that you’ve got a right to the data, not Elon Musk and DOGE. And we want to know what’s happened to it. Has it gone to his artificial intelligence private business, to Grok? Has it been shared with other third parties? The people have a right to know that.

And so, you know, my grandfather was in politics, and he told me when I was a little boy, he said that duck hunting is a lot of fun, until the ducks start shooting back. And I think people are going to insist that our rights be vindicated within American constitutional democracy.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Congressmember Raskin, your comments on what Chuck Schumer, the ranking Democratic member in the U.S. Senate, did, both supporting what was going to be called — the Trump administration threatened to call it the “Schumer shutdown,” but, actually, not so much that as having said to the end he would not go along with it, then switching, and the rifts in the Democratic Party now?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Well, I took a very strong position against that continuing resolution, which was packed with more efforts to dismantle the American social safety net, attacks on Medicaid, attacks on healthcare. And it also provided — and this was very troubling to me — retroactive validation, at least implicitly, of all of the assaults on the federal agencies and on the federal workers. So there was no way I could go along with it. Schumer took an opposite position after different twists and turns in his journey.

But I’ve got to say, Amy, what troubled me the most resembled what troubled me the most about what happened to us when Donald Trump showed up for the joint session of Congress. It’s that we did not have a unified plan across the House and the Senate within the Democratic Party to decide what to do. And I had said I would stick with any unified plan we had. We could boycott it. We could hold up signs. We could stage a walkout, whatever. But we needed to have a plan. We needed to call a play. And I think that’s the real political sin here, that House and Senate Democrats are acting like we occupy different galaxies. We’ve got to get together and decide what our common front and what our common strategy is. I’m an old, washed-up football quarterback. It’s like going out onto the field without any play at all.

AMY GOODMAN: So, do you think Schumer should step down as the ranking Democrat of the Senate?

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: You know, they’re going to go through that. I think we’re going through a period of tremendous upsurge and ferment and change in terms of political leadership across the board. And because we’ve been so separated, the Senate and the House Democrats, I really know very little about the internal dynamics that led to what took place there. So, I’ll reserve judgment on that. But I will say this is a moment where new political leadership is popping up everywhere, and that’s all to the good.

AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Jamie Raskin of Maryland, top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, former constitutional law professor, thanks so much for joining us.

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