Jamie Raskin drops LEGAL BOMB on top Trump official

I'm joined now by Congressman Jamie Raskin. Congressman, thanks for joining me again.

Brian, thank you for having me on.

So Congressman, you have some news to share about a new criminal referral that you're working on right now as it relates to a former top Trump administration official. Can you explain what

that news is? Well, I mean, we can't allow people to come before Congress and then lie or conceal material facts, both of which are against the law. It's against the law to make material false statements under oath, period. And then there's a specific statute which adds that you can't conceal material facts from Congress when you're testifying in Congress. And Kristi Noem came here, and it's just inescapable that she engaged in false statements and concealed material facts from Congress repeatedly.

So in terms of whether or not this criminal referral is successful, the criminal referral goes to the Department of Justice. And so if we're talking about putting the fate of whether or not Kristi Noem for lying to Congress, putting the fate of Kristi Noem in the hands of Pam Bondi, I think it's clear to everybody what Pam Bondi is going to do, or I should say what she is not going to do. And so how do you overcome the obstacle of the fact that this is a Department of Justice and an attorney general who are there not to uphold the law without fear of favor, but rather just to run a protection racket against Trump and all of his acolytes.

Well, I sent this letter with Senator Durbin from the Senate Judiciary Committee, and the single most important line in our letter might be the simple restatement of what the federal statute of limitations is on lying to Congress. And that's five years. And that takes you beyond the Trump administration. So all of those well-trained cabinet officials in the Trump administration who think that their job is just to cover up for the president and to lie in every context possible, must reflect

on the fact that we have federal criminal statutes which make it a crime to lie under oath and those actions, those criminal prosecutions can be brought for a five-year period.

So if we are in a world where Kristi Noem is held to account as, you know, there is a criminal referral sent to the DOJ and a subsequent attorney general, one who is not there to just protect Republican officials, but rather to uphold the law without fear of favor. If we enter that world, then why would it just be limited to Kristi Noem? There are other administration officials or other figures in the federal government who

have also committed the same violations. I think these are 1001 violations lying to Congress. Just a few weeks ago, Pam Bondi sat in front of a congressional committee and said that there is no evidence implicating Donald Trump or tying Donald Trump to the Epstein files. That's patently false. Now, the credibility of that evidence notwithstanding, she didn't make that caveat. She said there's

no evidence tying Donald Trump to any criminal activity within the Epstein files. And we know that there are interviews where Donald Trump was accused of committing crimes that are contained within the Epstein files. And so how are you thinking about this, about consistency as it relates to lying to Congress?

Well, I mean, some of the lies that no man engaged in are easily contradicted by the public record. So, for example, she said that DHS always complies with court orders and always follows court orders. We know that there were at least 210 cases that have been cited by courts themselves where the Department of Homeland Security violated court orders. And in fact, the Department of Justice even admitted it in 50 cases. And yet she said not. Okay, so that's one where we publicly can determine

that she was lying. But then she was also lying about things that she did, where it would be tough to know without pretty deep investigative work, that she was lying. But we were able to determine she was lying, for example, about this $220 million contract, where she told the Senate that that was the product of competitive bidding. That was a lie. My colleague, Joe Neguse, refuted her and said, here's the form you filled out to escape competitive bidding. You said you were invoking a national security exception,

why you needed to invoke a national security exception for a PR contract, you know, to show you on horseback, you know, out in the wild west, you know, is a little bit weird, but in any event, he showed that that wasn't true. And then she said, oh, well, right.

But you know, we looked at different bidders, but those were all different friends of hers. So that was a dodge about, you know, the competitive bidding process. So the bottom line is, you can't come and lie before Congress any more than you can go and lie in court. And we've got to hold the line on that to show that the perjury laws and the material false statement laws mean something.

But I guess my broader question is, there are other people who have also lied, who are, who have also told demonstrably false statements, not just Pam Bondi, for example, which was the the the example that I brought up before. But also, what about these Republican Supreme Court justices who, when they were just nominees sitting in front of, you know, the Senate for their advice and consent hearings, they said that they respected stare

decisis and respected precedent and then immediately went and overturned Roe versus Wade. I mean, there is this sense as people watch this that you can say whatever you want to Congress and then once you're in a position of power, you can flip flop immediately and there are just no consequences for it anymore.

That's right. Well look, in my point is this, the Supreme Court justices are in a somewhat different category. Like they all got up and they swore their field to started to sites is in precedent, but then it's very easy for them to invoke various exceptions to stare decisis when factual circumstances have changed, when the law has changed and so on. That's pretty slippery. So that's tough on that particular case. But the ones you've invoked with respect to the Attorney General are serious and real. And so we simply need to get the word out

in a deterrent way. We are watching you. You can't get up and lie before Congress under oath the way that Donald Trump can get up and lie the way he does every single day from the White House Oval Office

or on the tarmac someplace. Yeah, nobody can get him on that. The Supreme Court has said that under the First Amendment, you basically can't make it a crime to lie unless somebody's under oath or unless we're talking about fraud

in order to deprive somebody of their property and so on. But we can't get so conditioned by Donald Trump's lies that the word goes out among the cabinet secretaries that you can go ahead and say whatever you want. Now, the interesting thing about Attorney General Bondi was she refused directly to answer questions basically from any Democrat. She changed the subject.

She evaded, she began talking about irrelevant stuff going on in other parts of the country and so on.

I think she had her little burn book as well, so everything devolved into a personal attack against every Democrat.

She turned it into ad hominem attacks. All of that was a way, perhaps on her part, to avoid committing perjury. Because the truth is, none of them is going to say anything that contradicts Donald Trump. Now, one of the ways that we assert that Noam lied was with respect to Donald Trump, because she was asked the question, did you tell Donald Trump, did you get his approval? Then did he know that you had this $220 million contract? And she repeatedly said, both in the Senate and the House, that she did.

He directly refuted that and said he didn't know anything about it. One of them is lying. She was under oath. And if she was lying, that's perjury. He wasn't under oath and he lies all the time. So that might be the one that's hardest for us to prove. But in any event,

one of them is definitely lying. Congressman, is there anything that Congress can do to vindicate crimes against Congress, which is to say, lying to Congress, committing perjury, or committing contempt of Congress, to vindicate crimes against Congress if and when the DOJ inevitably abdicates its responsibility to adjudicate those things.

Right. Well, one thing we can do is we can wait for a future administration to come in if the statute of limitations lasts that long. That was the point I was making before. But we also can hold people in contempt of Congress. There's an old power that Congress has called inherent contempt. And the Supreme Court repeatedly ruled that the Congress has the power to render both civil and criminal

contempt charges. Civil contempt being holding someone or finding someone until they give Congress what Congress has demanded in a subpoena, whether it's testimony or documents or what have you, but also criminal contempt. You can be punished by Congress for acting in contempt of Congress, which would include lying. And there were people that were, that were talking a century ago now,

but who were held in contempt of Congress for engaging in behavior like that.

Is that something that Congress would consider looking into in the event that Democrats retake the House and Pam Bondi and this DOJ continue to abdicate their responsibilities to uphold the law?

Well, there was a lot of talk about it during the first Trump administration when we had a majority in the first two years and a lot of people explored it and people were even looking for the old jail that nobody could find that was somewhere in the maze of the Capitol basement to see whether this could be done. It never really crystallized legislatively, but it could crystallize legislatively in

the future if we continue to have spokespeople for the administration, cabinet secretaries, coming forward and blatantly lying to Congress.

Is there a world in which that contempt power could be used to compel the release of the Epstein files if we're at a point where Pam Bondi continues to refuse to release these three million outstanding documents?

There is nothing in the inherent power of contempt that would prevent that from being used in that way. Now, we shouldn't have to, you know, cite the inherent power of congressional contempt to get the executive branch of government to comply, not just with a subpoena, but with a federal law. But we will use any means at our disposal.

But basically, Congress would go to court to say that there's not compliance taking place and that the federal government is not itself enforcing the law. But I would say we have to use any means at our disposal to restore the rule of law in America. And we are living through this absolutely atrocious reign of lawlessness and terror, as we saw in Minneapolis. And, you know, if you've got government agents who think that

the Constitution doesn't apply to them and the rule of law doesn't apply to them, then you're going to end up seeing U.S. citizens getting shot in the face by government agents. And that's where we're at. Donald Trump, who feels absolute immunity and impunity because of some things the Supreme Court has done, has let the message go out throughout his administration that they're somehow above the law. And that's what makes it such a dangerous moment.

And actually, I wanted to ask you about exactly that, which is some news that Greg Bovino, who was formerly the person who was overseeing all of these operations, including when Rene Good and Alex Pretty were shot and killed in the streets of Minneapolis, that there is reporting now that he will be leaving government at the end of this month. Can I have your reaction to that?

Yeah, I mean, I don't know under what circumstances, because I'm hearing this from you. I'm not sure I saw that before. So there does seem to be an effort to change the subject. Minneapolis was an absolute political waterloo for the Republican Party, where millions and millions of Americans turned against them for violating not just the rights of immigrants, but the rights of US citizens to the point of shooting them because they were bearing a lawful firearm consistent with state law and the Second Amendment to the point where,

you know, US citizens are being shot down simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. So they're not supposed to use apparently the phrase mass deportation anymore. The public understands that mass deportation is shorthand for violating the rights of the people and trampling the Bill of Rights. So I don't know whether getting rid of him now is part of that or like most of them, he wants to try to cash in

as quickly as possible and make money as quickly as possible because I understand that the whole thing from jump ball is they're trying to make as much money as possible off of the American people. And Donald Trump has made billions of dollars in just over one year in office. And we believe that the Trumps want to make themselves the richest family in America before they leave office or before they're forced to leave office.

Congressman, I want to switch gears finally to one last point, and that is that applications are now open for the Democracy Summer 2026 program. And this is this is a program you and I have spoken about at length. So can you give a little bit of an introduction on what that is for folks who don't know about it and why it's so important?

Well, I appreciate that, Brian. It's for high school and college kids across America who are paying attention politically or maybe just starting to pay attention and wanna get more engaged and involved. And so you sign up with Democracy Summer,

you will get to participate in nationwide campaign Zooms with people like Heather Cox Richardson and Larry Tribe and Tim Snyder and Benny Thompson, Nancy Pelosi, you name it. And then you go out and you exercise your First Amendment rights by involving yourself with the campaign. And there people are engaged in door knocking, in canvassing, in registering voters, what have you. And so it's a really great life-changing opportunity,

but you'll be able to change not just your life, but your country too, because young people have been dramatically affected by things going on, whether we're talking about war, whether we're talking about the high cost of housing and education and groceries, and young people need to be engaged in this process. And that's without even getting to some overarching

crises of our time, like climate change and like artificial intelligence that young people need to have their voices engaged in.

Well, look, if anybody watching is in high school or college or know someone in high school or college who you think would be a good fit for this program, I could not recommend it highly enough. I've been a major fan of this for years and years and years. So I'm going to put the link to Democracy Summer right here on the screen and also in the post description of this video.

Again, highly recommend that you sign up. Congressman, as always, thank you for the time. I appreciate it so much. I appreciate it so much.

Thank you so much, Brian.