There is perhaps no one in Congress who is a more comprehensive constitutional expert than Representative Jamie Raskin.
After Rep. Raskin attempted to have Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva sworn in and was rebuffed during a pre-trial hearing of the House of Representatives, Raskin and Grijalva joined House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a news conference where he gave his daily update on the government shutdown.
The threat to Rep.’s life Jeffries (D-NY) by a 1/6 criminal whom Trump pardoned seemed to deeply disturb Raskin, who said:
Until Donald Trump, the pardon process was governed by Justice Department rules, by law, and of course by the Constitution. And there was a very consistent pattern, namely that each pardon application was assessed on its own merits. It was analyzed what exactly that person had done. What they were convicted of, and until Donald Trump, no one had ever been pardoned who had not repaid their victims for a crime or paid back fines to the government.
In other words, you had to have made yourself completely whole. Then you had to demonstrate that you had been rehabilitated, that you accepted the reality of your transgression. Compare that to what happened with Trump. He steps in on his first day on the job without any report from the pardon attorney on any of these people, and without any recommendation that they have paid their restitution. They paid their fines. They made peace with their victims and so on. They have apologized to the police.
No, none of that had happened. Instead, they granted a blanket pardon to anyone who stormed the Capitol and participated in the shocking and horrific events of January 6.
So what do you have in that mix? You have people who have previously been convicted of domestic violence, assault, armed robbery, you name it, drug trafficking, arms trafficking. That’s all there. And what do you know after this mass pardon takes place? People are being arrested again.
There’s a guy in Richmond who broke into all the houses in his neighborhood, and now this guy. Moynihan says he will eliminate the minority leader of the United States House of Representatives. So there are plenty of people at the Justice Department who know a lot about January 6, including Ed Martin, who tweeted there that day and described it as a holiday like Mardi Gras and his senior advisor, Jared Wise, who was here shouting kill him about the police, that they need to know how to bring these people in line because it’s a very dangerous situation.
Raskin set the stage for what he was about to say to Johnson, which you can read and watch below.
