Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Hearing Marking Five Years Since the Jan. 6 Attack
Washington, D.C. (January 6, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at House Democrats’ hearing marking five years since the January 6 attack on the Capitol, featuring testimony from former law enforcement, state officials, Members who were present at the Capitol on that day, and a Jan. 6 participant who rejected Trump’s pardon, amid an ongoing effort by Republicans to whitewash the truth.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
House Judiciary Committee
“After January 6th: Setting the Record Straight on the Capitol Insurrection”
January 6, 2026
William Faulkner said: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Speaker Johnson would love to kill the past, indeed the very recent past. They’re observing this solemn anniversary by doing, well, exactly nothing. They have even refused to hang the plaque which a bipartisan Congressional majority voted to put up to honor the officers who defended the Capitol, the peaceful transition of power, and the Vice President on Jan. 6.
It’s been five years since January 6th. It’s been three years since that plaque was supposed to be put up but they still haven’t put it up. It took them 24 hours to put up a new plaque, allegedly changing the name of the Kennedy Center to the Trump Kennedy Center. 24 hours. And that was illegal. That’s like graffiti that was put up on the Kennedy Center building. They have a legal requirement to put the plaque up, and I call on Speaker Johnson to put it up today. It’s gathering dust in a closet somewhere.
Thank you, Leader Jeffries and Chairman Thompson for not surrendering to that Orwellian project of forgetting but rather insisting that we remember long after we are all gone. Future generations will speak the names of Hodges and Dunn, Gonnell and Fanone, Sicknick and Pingeon. They will be remembered as the great patriots that they are. And the people who smashed them in the face with Confederate battle flags and Trump flags, the people who tried to destroy our constitutional order will be remembered as fascist traitors to their own country.
So we must remember three rings of sedition that took place on Jan. 6, the realm of the coup, the realm of the insurrection, and the realm of the mob violence. The coup was anchored in months of the Big Lie. Trump claimed to have won an election he lost by more than 7 million votes, 306 to 232, in the Electoral College. He needed to get MAGA followers to simply disregard reality and facts and dismiss more than 60 federal and state court decisions that rejected every claim of electoral fraud and corruption that they advanced in courtrooms across the land. This was critical because the President understood that lies would be the fuel for violence. As Voltaire said: “Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
The coup depended also on coercive pressure campaigns trying to force state election officials to just “find 11,780 votes,” coercive pressure campaigns to get DOJ to endorse the false claims, to just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen, the recruitment of counterfeit electors, the plot to bully Pence into rejecting the Electoral College votes from swing states and either just declare Trump president or kick the whole thing into a contingent election in the House. That was the crucial part of the operation.
The second realm of the insurrection was the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the muscle. And these were the white supremacist violent groups, white Christian nationalist groups that had trained for weeks or months to get ready, staging confrontations in state capitals as dress rehearsals for what was to happen.
The Proud Boys came to D.C. twice in the lead up to Jan. 6 and provoked brawls with anyone that they would describe as “Antifa.” They organized in military fashion and they were dead set on attacking the police, storming the Capitol and “Stopping the Steal.” So, as ferocious and violent as the organized insurrectionists of maybe 600 or 700 were, they could not have succeeded without that third tier of sedition, the mob itself, the mob riot.
After Trump convinced the organizers to change the date of their rally from January 20th Inauguration Day to January 6th, the electoral count day, he then went on social media to recruit tens of thousands of mob extras to back up the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers, who would get the fight against the police started. And you know, Trump kicked it off with the famous Tweet, “Be there. Will be wild!”, which set the MAGA Twitterverse on fire. Well, it all culminated, of course, with his speech on the Ellipse where he said: “You have to go and fight and fight like hell or you won’t have a country anymore.”.So the attempted coup, the insurrection, the mob violence converged and exploded on Jan. 6.
Today we analyze the shocking, resurgence of political violence in this century, its relationship to propaganda, misinformation and disinformation and the threat that it poses to American constitutional government. We honor the heroes who helped us to defeat this attack on our democracy. We also recognize today that the political violence unleashed by Trump did not end on Jan. 6.
On his first day back in office last year, he pardoned nearly 1,600 of the rioters and insurrectionists, including hundreds who violated police officers, including several in this room. Those pardons were raw spoils shared indiscriminately without regard to their actual offenses, their criminal sentences, their prior records, their contrition, their repentance, or their reform and rehabilitation. They were essentially a payoff to Trump’s private militia, which is now ready to stand back and stand by again for future engagements.
They pose a serious threat to public safety. As we show in a report released by House Judiciary Democrats this week, at least 33 pardoned insurrectionists have since committed additional crimes, since Jan. 6th, including child sexual assault, terroristic threats, domestic violence and conspiracy to murder FBI agents. And yet, Trump indiscriminately pardoned all of them. When you reward and normalize criminal behavior, of course you invite more of it.
And the President did not just free his rioters for doing his dirty work. He punished law enforcement for doing their jobs, purging hundreds of career FBI agents and prosecutors just because they worked on Jan. 6. He installed actual participants in the attack in the Department of Justice itself. The new U.S. pardon attorney Ed Martin tweeted from the Capitol grounds on this day five years ago and described the mayhem as “Mardi Gras in D.C.”
His senior counsellor at the DOJ, Jared Wise, is a Jan. 6 defendant captured on body camera footage yelling “kill ‘em, kill ‘em” five different times as officers were attacked. These leaders at the DOJ today have never once regretted their participation in this nightmare. With election deniers and J6 conspiracists Pam Bondi and Kash Patel at the top of the DOJ, it’s like the Joker and the Riddler and the Penguin have taken over Gotham City.
I close with the thought that it is still January 6th in America and it will be until the forces of strong nonviolent democracy prevail. We are still in the fight of our lives.