Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing on Republican Attempts to Distract from their Failing Public Safety Agenda
Washington, D.C. (November 19, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at a Subcommittee on Oversight hearing making clear that while Democratic-led cities are helping drive a historic nationwide decrease in violent crime by implementing effective and proven solutions, Trump and Republicans are rewarding criminal behavior, dismantling federal law enforcement, and endangering communities by pardoning violent offenders, firing prosecutors, and defunding programs that protect victims and survivors.
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
Hearing on “Restoring Law and Order in High-Crime U.S. Cities”
November 19, 2025
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.
I wanted to just begin by underscoring three things that you said that I hope people will keep in mind as you hear my remarks. One is that when you reward criminal behavior, you get a lot more of it. Two, you said it’s not funny when it happens to you. And, I have a personal story to tell. And three, you said letting criminals off the hook is not compassion and it’s not justice. So I want to agree very strongly with those three points that you just made, Chairman Van Drew. And I want to thank the witnesses for being with us today.
Just before the shutdown, the Subcommittee convened a field hearing in Charlotte to advance the tired, I would say, utterly exhausted Republican claim that Democrats are somehow soft on crime. This is an odd proposition to me, given that Democratic-led cities today are now driving an historic nationwide decrease in crime, especially homicide and violent crime, following a dramatic spike in those categories under the first Trump Administration.
One North Carolina local news outlet, the News & Observer, captured the very paradoxical nature of that hearing in an article titled, “Republicans are in charge in North Carolina. But somehow Democrats are to blame for violent crime.” Well, the News & Observer is correct. Republicans from the White House to Congress to the state houses are systematically undermining public safety and communities across America with what I would call gangster state policies, while claiming that Democrats are to blame.
What’s really going on? Let’s start with the Administration’s first day in office. How about that? On the first day, Donald Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6th insurrectionists, people who either pled guilty or were convicted beyond a reasonable doubt by a jury of their peers for hundreds and hundreds of crimes, including hundreds who violently attacked Capitol Police officers, Metropolitan Police Department officers, Montgomery County, Maryland police officers, police officers from Virginia, and so on, with baseball bats, steel pipes, Trump flags, confederate battle flags, broken furniture and bear mace into people’s eyes.
In the months since, the Department of Justice proceeded to fire dozens of FBI agents and federal prosecutors, the most experienced federal prosecutors we had, career civil servants appointed under Republican presidents and Democratic presidents, simply because they had worked in the January 6th investigation.
Nothing like that had ever happened before in the history of the Department of Justice, and I hope nothing like that will ever happen again. These were career civil servants, expert criminal prosecutors fired because they had prosecuted people for violently attacking police officers, storming the Capitol, saying they were going to hang Mike Pence in order to overthrow a presidential election. And they got fired because of it, a massive violation of civil service, constitutional rights and the principles of public safety.
140 of our officers were injured, wounded, disfigured, disabled, hospitalized on that day, 140 of them. I wish I could take 140 minutes and tell you about each one, but I’ll tell you about one of them. I’ll tell you about Sergeant Gonell. Now, Sergeant Gonell has written a book about his experience, which I recommend highly to all of you. His family were immigrants to America. He became a citizen as a kid. And he fell in love with police work. And his family took a trip to Washington, and they visited the Capitol, and he met police officers here. And he had a dream that he would become a Capitol Police officer one day.
And what do you know? He became a Capitol Police officer after he served in the Army. And he went to Iraq and he went to Afghanistan. And then he was here on January 6th. And he said he faced violence, which he described as medieval in nature, that was far worse than anything he had seen in combat, in Iraq or in Afghanistan. And he fought for hours and hours, and he was so wounded, they destroyed a rotator cuff, his left foot was smashed and destroyed. He couldn’t lift his shoulder. He was beaten in the face, in the head. He did everything he could to try to get back to work, and the force told him he was just no longer physically fit to do it. Forced to retire by the insurrection Donald Trump incited, according to a bipartisan vote of the House of Representatives, which 57 of 100 senators voted to convict him on the most widespread bipartisan vote in the history of presidential impeachments.
He was that wounded, that disfigured, that incapacitated—he could no longer serve. He had to leave his dream job and is now living on a fraction of what his income was before because of that violence that took place.
That’s just one story. I wish you could know all of the stories. Maybe you know the story of Michael Fanone, who’s a D.C. cop. He wasn’t even on duty here. He heard about it that the Capitol was under attack on the radio. He immediately drove to the Capitol, got off several blocks away, ran to the scene to join the police officers, and he got pulled into the crowd after fighting for hours. And he had a heart attack, and he was afraid that he was going to die. And he begged them. He said, I have four daughters, spare my life. And his life was just barely spared.
There’s supposed to be a plaque up in the House of Representatives to honor the officers because of their indomitable valor and courage that day. But the Speaker won’t put that up, and they won’t give a dollar to the families of any of these police officers whose lives have been so fundamentally altered. But they did sneak a little provision in to give $1 million to each Republican senator who were inconvenienced because they were treated like other American citizens and had their phone records subpoenaed because they were involved with the conspirators of that attack.
That’s where the sympathies run. Each of those guys wasn’t getting $1 million payout. At least I think I heard Lindsey Graham today say he wanted tens of millions for what happened to him. What happened to him? Did he get sprayed in the face with bear mace? Did he have to fight for hours to protect American democracy? No. His phone records were subpoenaed the same way any Americans phone records can be subpoenaed if they’re involved in a criminal conspiracy, or if their name comes up in a criminal investigation. And if you don’t like that, you should support the bill that Chairman Jordan brought before us in markup yesterday, which we passed unanimously numerous times, that would save all Americans from abuse of that process. We’ve been trying to do that for nearly a decade, I believe, we from this Committee, and the Senate has consistently rejected it. They’re not interested in protecting anybody else’s civil liberties. They just want their million-dollar jackpot payout.
Well, in any event, that was the story on January 6th. And this Administration has done everything in its power now to reward the people who participated in it. Meantime, they’re firing the officers, the FBI agents, the prosecutors who tried to prosecute it.
Now, I want to tell you, though, a lot of people would want to sweep the whole thing under the rug and they think it’s over. But, you know, crime doesn’t really work like that. Criminals don’t work like that. As the good Chairman said when he kicked this off, if you forgive crime, if you pardon it, if you let it go, you’re going to see more of it.
Well, let me tell you a little story about that, because we’ve got lots of cases of these pardoned criminals going out and committing other crimes. Let me tell you the ones that we found that have been committed by people that Donald Trump pardoned on his first day in office, they’ve gone on to do terroristic threats, home invasion, burglary, vandalism, theft, felony assault with a deadly weapon, discharge of a firearm, manslaughter, drunk driving, grand theft, aggravated kidnaping, reckless driving, reckless homicide, invasion of privacy, conspiracy to commit murder as a hate crime, possession of child pornography, violation of protective orders, assault, violation of anti-stalking order, DUI, battery, felony, malicious bodily injury, rape, forgery, sexual assault, illegal gun possession, drug possession, conspiracy to murder. Who’s responsible for all that? These people were pardoned by Donald Trump, sentences commuted, out on the streets now, these people doing all of that.
Let me tell you about one of them. I told you I was going to get a little bit personal here. I take the subject raised today personally. This guy’s name is Taylor Taranto. He was pardoned after being convicted of multiple crimes on January 6th. But he was rearrested in 2023 for illegal possession of hundreds of rounds of ammunition and two guns and a machete after he was livestreaming from the woods near former President Barack Obama’s house. He went there with all the ammunition and guns, and he threatened to set off a car bomb. Well, on the way there, he showed up at the elementary school two blocks away from my house, where all three of my kids went to elementary school, and he told listeners that he was at the elementary school near my house on his livestream. He said he was near my house. That’s where he was headed next. And he didn’t want to tell anybody where I lived because he said, “I want Raskin all to myself.” Fortunately, my wife and I and my kids were not at home when he stopped there on his way down to Barack Obama’s house.
This is a January 6th insurrectionist who’s been pardoned by Donald Trump. You may have read about him recently in the newspaper, because at the sentencing for other crimes, two Department of Justice lawyers mentioned that he had participated in the riots at January 6th, and his superior officers, the Department of Justice objected to the fact that these DOJ lawyers had referred to the January 6th riots and suspended them. These lawyers were reprimanded for what they had done and they were suspended simply for mentioning the reality that January 6th had taken place.
Look, it’s not just January 6th. Trump recently pardoned crypto executive Changpeng Zhao, who had been sentenced to four months in prison in order to pay one of the largest corporate penalties in history after pleading guilty to enabling money laundering through his crypto exchange. According to prosecutors, he aided Hamas, he aided Al Qaeda and other terrorist networks, but Donald Trump pardoned him.
He also pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road, an online black market that allowed thousands of drug dealers to distribute hundreds of kilos of illegal drugs, including heroin, cocaine and opioids.
Take Ghislaine Maxwell, who was transferred from a prison to a prison camp after the number two at DOJ went to see her on July 22nd. The Democrats and Oversight Committee moved to subpoena her. They got Republicans to come over and agree. The next day, she was sent her subpoena. And the next day after that, July 24th, that’s when Todd Blanche went to see her, not to ask about more co-conspirators, not to investigate whether other crimes had been committed. No, he was trying to find out exactly what she might say about Donald Trump when she came to Congress, and, satisfied with her answers, President Trump, the great champion of law and order, apparently authorized and approved her transfer to a prison camp where no sex offender had ever been sent before, because they’re not allowed. Because sex offenders like Ghislaine Maxwell are considered violent offenders.
But that wasn’t it. It wasn’t just enough that she got to cut the line and get there in one or two days when people are waiting six months, eight months, two years to transfer after proving they have a compelling reason to do so. No, she was transferred overnight. She gets there and then she gets the superstar Trump Hotel treatment. She gets room service in her cell. Ever hear of that before? Well, she gets meals brought to her. She gets special exercise privileges there. She gets special visitors. They come whenever she wants them to come, and they’re allowed to bring their computers. And they don’t even deny that. They just say they want the people who brought that as whistleblowers to Members of this Committee, they want those people punished. And her lawyer was bragging about the fact that they were punished, in other words, that they suffered retaliation for speaking out when this Committee has always stood up for the rights of whistleblowers to tell the truth about abuse of law in America.
Well, they’ve taken a wrecking ball to the federal government’s ability to investigate and prosecute criminals. The DOJ is hemorrhaging thousands of lawyers. They’re having a very difficult time recruiting people to this absurd environment where the President has taken over all prosecutorial functions, and now they are wasting resources just to follow the political program of Donald Trump.
You’ve seen how he fired his own U.S. Attorney, Mr. Siebert, in Virginia, because he wouldn’t bring charges against James Comey. That’s what Donald Trump wanted. So he sacks him. He puts in another attorney who’s never been a prosecutor before, never been an assistant U.S. Attorney or anything. She’s so incompetent, the judge in the Comey case now says that they’re going to have to throw it out, likely, because she messed up the entire grand jury indictment process. And yet he continues to go after his political opponents. What a radical distortion of justice that is, and what a waste of our resources.
They are draining resources away from human sex trafficking, away from child sex exploitation, away from drug trafficking, to go and either participate in their anti-immigration campaign or just to do whatever Donald Trump wants them to do.
So, my friends, this is the record that they want to brag about when we’ve got real Democratic mayors across America who are—and some Republican mayors, but mostly Democratic mayors—who are actually reducing crime in fighting crime? I mean, what an outrage this is. One of the other things they did when they first got in was they got rid of hundreds of grants that were being given to local law enforcement, to the police.
Talk about defunding the police. Well, they defunded the police, certainly anything having to do with human sex trafficking, anything having to do with child sex exploitation, they just got rid of it all.
So, Mr. Chairman, I’m glad you said exactly what you did when you kicked this off. It’s not funny when it happens to you, and it’s not when you’ve got a pardoned January 6th person coming to your house with weapons on his way down to Barack Obama’s house with a machete. Now that’s not funny. And also, when you reward criminal behavior, as this Administration has done from day one, you’re going to get a lot more of it. And they’re headed to turning us into a gangster state. I thank you, and I look forward to hearing the testimony of the witnesses.