Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing Examining Threats Posed by China
Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet hearing examining the threat posed by China while Republicans conveniently ignore how Trump has cozied up to China’s president and ceded global power to the CCP.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet
Hearing on “Foreign Abuse of U.S. Courts”
July 22, 2025
Thank you, Chairman Issa, and thank you to the witnesses for being with us here today.
Like its ally the authoritarian government of Russia, the authoritarian government of China presents a serious threat to American democracy, our economy and our national security. And China’s intensifying economic and technological competition with the United States has, at times, led to pitched battles in courtrooms across the country. We have seen cases affecting our national security, intellectual property, and the safety of Chinese dissidents living in America.
It would be great if we had a partner in the White House to help us respond to the threat of these repressive autocratic regimes, but Donald Trump has consistently bragged about his marvelous personal relationships with President Xi and Vladimir Putin. He has been systematically dismantling the programs that protect us against espionage, propaganda, and malign political and electoral interference by Russia and China while simultaneously dismantling the domestic programs that make the American people strong.
His Administration has been deleting the programs designed to combat malign foreign power interference in our elections, including the Foreign Influence Task Force at the FBI, Global Engagement Center at the Department of State, the Critical Infrastructure Partnership Council at the Department of Homeland Security, while simultaneously cutting billions of dollars in critical foreign aid to poorer countries which China is now gladly taking up in our place. Trump has also been systematically destroying Radio Liberty, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia and other broadcast vehicles we use to counter Chinese and Russian propaganda and disinformation all over the world. Trump has put the pathetic Kari Lake in charge of world communications, an election denier, J6 denier and all-around mindless repeater of garbage conspiracy theories and lies totally consistent with the Chinese and Russian agendas for the destruction of American democracy.
This hearing is a distraction from this structural shift in our government in favor of the autocracies and kleptocracies, Donald Trump’s political soul brothers.
It is also, of course, a distraction from the mounting failures and embarrassments of this Administration. Republicans this month passed a bill that will throw 17 million Americans off their Medicaid healthcare coverage. The recissions package Congress passed last week cuts a billion dollars from public broadcasting and billions more from foreign aid, all of which is music to the ears of propagandists and foreign recruiters for China and Russia.
Meantime, Trump is refusing to release the Epstein files. More than 100,000 documents which he was demanding for years in order to blow the lid off of what he and Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and Dan Bongino and the MAGA media were describing as a massive global child sex abuse and human trafficking ring for the rich and powerful. Bondi, acting under the direct supervision of Donald Trump, ordered more than 1,000 FBI agents to work as part of continuing 24-hour shifts pouring over more than 100,000 documents in the Epstein file—photographs, videos, emails and texts—they were instructed to immediately flag all references to Donald Trump, all appearances of Donald Trump and all images, likenesses, pictures and videos of Donald Trump.
At the same time, Kash Patel has been administering loyalty tests and lie detector tests to FBI agents. So this is a profoundly troubling and suspicious turn of events as Donald Trump seeks to sweep the whole thing under the rug, and our colleagues in the majority have now canceled all bills because they don’t want to go before the Rules Committee to have to face more votes on whether or not to release the Epstein files.
So, we’re examining the threat from China as though Donald Trump is not ceding more global power to China every single day, but he is.
During his first term, Trump received millions from the Chinese government and state-owned companies—to say nothing of the valuable trademarks Chinese authorities rushed to grant him and his family members. In exchange, he opposed sanctions against Chinese telecommunications companies and banks even when they threatened our national security. He even tried to cancel military exercise with Japan and South Korea because China and Russia complained.
And his second term has seen more catering and appeasement to the autocrats. Over the last six months, the Trump Administration has weakened America’s soft power abroad by defunding foreign aid programs and closing embassies. It’s hurt America’s economy with illegal and arbitrary tariffs that leave us isolated and hapless in the world.
In his second Administration, Trump appears to be hell-bent on remaking his Administration in the image of Xi’s regime: Cracking down on media outlets he disapproves of, destroying academic freedom with attempted hostile takeovers of the “ideology” of colleges and universities including America’s oldest university, Harvard, attacking attorneys for representing clients or causes he disfavors, purging libraries and censoring books, sending masked agents in unmarked vans to arrest foreign students for voicing opinions he disagrees with, shipping people to El Salvador’s notorious prison of torture, and using AI to surveil individuals’ social media posts and to create a mega database of Americans’ information.
In America, everyone is allowed to petition the court for relief, regardless of the depth of their pockets or their country of origin. Making it harder for litigants to access the courthouse doors—even in the name of strategic competition with a foreign power—would make us less like America, and that is unacceptable. Yet that’s exactly what some have suggested instead of actually developing government policies that make us strong versus China and prevent illegal subversion and interference from China and Russia.
In the context of our strategic competition with China, we should never forget that “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” This has historically been a matter on which there has been strong bipartisan agreement, and I hope Republicans and Democrats on this Committee can continue to uphold this basic yet vital framework as we move forward.
I yield back the balance of my time.