Ranking Member Raskin Slams GOP’s Sham Attack on Civil Rights as Trump DOJ Targets SPLC; Also Moves to Subpoena Architects of Trump Slush Fund
Washington, D.C. (May 20, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at a hearing condemning Republicans’ escalating assault on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in the aftermath of a baseless Department of Justice (DOJ) prosecution aimed at silencing civil rights advocates while emboldening extremist groups. Ranking Member Raskin also moved to subpoena individuals involved in the creation of President Trump’s $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded slush fund.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
House Judiciary Committee
Hearing on “The Southern Poverty Law Center: Manufacturing Hate”
May 20, 2026
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
For decades the Southern Poverty Law Center shared information about racist terror plots with the FBI gleaned from their informant program. The FBI was happy to receive it and this practice frequently led to the disruption of violent and dangerous conspiracies by the KKK and Neo-Nazi groups to commit violence against synagogues, churches, African-Americans, Jews and other targeted minorities. So why is the DOJ under Donald Trump and Todd Blanche now prosecuting the Southern Poverty Law Center? The DOJ says that the Southern Poverty Law Center defrauded its donors by paying undercover informants to infiltrate and collect intelligence on these racist groups. But where are all the donors complaining about having been defrauded? Where is the fraud? Where are their lawsuits?
Trump’s Department of Justice has offered no evidence that anyone was actually deceived or defrauded by this perfectly lawful, well-known and accepted practice that the FBI approved for many years. Using informants and undercover agents was indeed the basis for the FBI’s own efforts to investigate racist extremist groups when that was a priority before the targets of the FBI became instead the perceived political foes of Donald Trump. In fact, what its donors love about the SPLC is how effective it has been getting on the inside of extremely dangerous terrorist groups to find out what is going on to try to stop bombings, assaults, lynchings and arson.
Why are there no fraud lawsuits? Why has no one sued the SPLC? From my experience as a former state Assistant Attorney General and co-chair of the bipartisan anti-Fraud Caucus, I can assure you that victims of fraud are usually enraged after being embarrassed and then come forward to complain and sue the fraudsters. What does a real fraud case look like and how do the victims respond? Well, consider the long-running fraud called Trump University which was shut down by the New York Attorney General’s office for systematically deceiving and ripping off its students and cheating them of a real education. Over 8,000 swindled students brought three different class action lawsuits that were certified against Trump. They tried for years to recover their tens of thousands dollars each in lost tuition for a completely bogus education and finally won a settlement for $25 million. There were more than 8,000 desperate young people who identified themselves and told their stories to the world. So far, to my knowledge, there is not a single donor to the Southern Poverty Law Center who has come forward to say he or she was defrauded, much less thousands of them. And they have many thousands of donors.
Everyone can see what is happening here with this outrageous, scandalous prosecution in Alabama and outrageous, scandalous persecution in Washington, D.C. If anyone has flipped sides to join the racist extremists, it is not the SPLC; it is the FBI. And if a fraud is being perpetrated on the public right now, it is not an SPLC fraud. SPLC has been an enemy of the Ku Klux Klan and various neo-Nazi groups for more than a half century and it has been unswerving and steadfast, which is why their offices were bombed and why they continue to receive an unending stream of violent threats and death threats, something which makes this prosecution all the more appalling. No, what we are witnessing is a Trump administration fraud on a vast and shocking scale.
President Donald Trump has coddled and cultivated the extreme Right for as long as he has been in politics. After the infamous “Unite the Right” Rally in Charlottesville in August 2017, when neo-Nazis marched on a synagogue and the University of Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us,” when a homicidal extremist drove his car into peaceful counter-protesters and killed Heather Heyer, Trump could only bring himself to say that there were “some very fine people on both sides.” In 2020, when he has directly asked to condemn white supremacists in a nationally televised presidential debate, he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” which they immediately adopted as their motto and emblazoned on their T-shirts.
In office, the Trump Administration has dismantled the anti-domestic terror infrastructure at the FBI, the DOJ, and the Department of Homeland Security, constantly shifting resources away from monitoring racially motivated violent extremism to immigration enforcement. He’s gutted the Civil Rights Division, which is charged with prosecuting hate crimes; defunded the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships, which had helped prevent more than 1,000 violent plots since 2020; and installed a 22-year-old with zero national security experience to run what remains of our terrorism prevention office. He has redirected the Civil Rights Division to focus on so-called “anti-white discrimination” instead of the actual hate crimes devastating communities across this country. He fired the federal prosecutors and FBI agents who investigated and convicted the extremists who attacked the Capitol, the Congress and the Vice-President on January 6.
And just this month, the Trump Administration released a new national counterterrorism strategy that literally erases right-wing violent extremism from the record. The strategy identifies drug cartels, Islamist terrorists, and “violent left-wing extremists” as the nation’s top threats, but makes no mention whatsoever of far-right extremism, white supremacist violence, or domestic neo-Nazi terror. This despite a decade of data from the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies showing that right-wing extremists carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 people, compared with 35 attacks and 13 deaths attributed to left-wing extremists. Again, he just blames his enemies for what his own side is doing.
Trump’s authentic relationship to the extreme Right was on full display on January 6, 2021 when the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and the 3%ers, all in Roger Stone’s sphere of influence, led the violent assault on the Capitol and our police force as Trump exhorted a crowd of thousands to go and “fight and fight like hell or we won’t have a country anymore.” That mob not only chanted “hang Mike Pence” and tried to shut down the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in American history but brutally assaulted the police, wounding, injuring, disfiguring and disabling more than 150 police officers, terminating many police careers in the process.
But what has President Trump done to support, praise or even just thank the police officers who saved Members of the House and Senate and his own Vice President from the rampaging mob he incited against us? Nothing. What has he done to help Sergeant Gonnell, whose brutal injuries have forced him to retire from the Capitol Police force job he loved, his dream job after he returned from fighting in Iraq? Nothing. What has he done to help Officer Harry Dunn, who was taunted with racial slurs throughout the day, or Officer Michael Fanone, who wasn’t even on duty but came down to join his brothers and sisters in blue to defend our democracy and was nearly ripped to shreds by the mob, which gave him a heart attack before he begged for mercy saying he had four daughters at home? Nothing.
No, Trump praises the convicted J6 criminals, calling them “heroes,” “martyrs,” “patriots,” even “hostages.” He pardoned and commuted the sentences of more than 1500 of them on his first day in office, both the violent felons who attacked our police with Confederate Battle flags, baseball bats, and steel pipes, and the extremist organizers behind the scenes who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, the deliberate and coordinated effort to overturn the election of President Biden and overthrow and put down the government of the United States. Trump was not interested in the specific criminal backgrounds of any of the January 6 criminals he pardoned, whether they were child abusers, armed robbers, or drug traffickers, nor was he interested in whether they had shown any contrition or remorse for the worst mob attack on the Capitol and the police in the history of the Capital City. Nor was he interested in whether they had paid back fines or restitution for the tens of millions of dollars in damages they cost. Trump just pardoned them all or commuted their sentences en masse, overriding the Pardon Attorney in the Department of Justice and liberating his private militia.
Many of these pardoned convicts have already gone out to commit more crimes since Trump let them out of jail. Take, for example, Andrew Paul Johnson who Trump let out of jail and then promptly went out and sexually attacked and molested two 12-year old children, one boy and one girl. He is now back in prison for life but Trump’s stupid blundering decision-making has forever altered the lives of those children. Oh, and by the way, last year Andrew Paul Johnson, in a desperate bid to get those children not to turn him into police authorities, told them that because he stormed the Capitol on January 6 he was going to be “awarded ten million dollars” for his work and he would split the money with them if they agreed not to talk to the police and prosecutors.
This brings us to the real fraud underway this week. Donald Trump has withdrawn his utterly bogus $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS because the judge in the case, Kathleen Williams, doubted there was even a case or controversy and whether Trump had proper standing to bring it. And there was clearly no adverse relationship between Trump and the IRS nor were there any damages. In any event, he withdrew it because it was clear he was going to lose.
Now Trump is claiming that he and the IRS have a so-called “settlement” which is not possible because the case was dismissed. This fraudulent “settlement” involves not only an agreement by the IRS and the DOJ not to investigate or prosecute him, his family and his businesses forever for tax frauds he has committed but the establishment of a $1.776 billion political slush fund in the Department of Justice called the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that will be used to reward Trump’s friends, lieutenants and foot soldiers.
This is lawless. To begin with, Donald Trump doesn’t establish federal programs and then authorize and appropriate money for them. We do. That is the power of the purse which belongs exclusively to Congress. We never set up this political slush fund to be run out of the Department of Justice and we never would. We have a judicial system to hear authentic cases and controversies. Not a single J6er criminal convict has had charges thrown out because of a false, malicious or retaliatory prosecution. Not a single one has had their criminal conviction thrown out on appeal because of a false, malicious or retaliatory prosecution. The idea that they were falsely or maliciously prosecuted has not been found by a single judge—Republican, Democrat or Independent—and is a defamatory slur on law enforcement and the serious civil servants at the Department of Justice who have been under attack since this nightmare of MAGA weaponization began in January of 2025. False, malicious and retaliatory prosecutions are how Donald Trump operates, not real law enforcement, not real prosecutors.
We also would never set up a political slush fund to compensate the J6ers for imaginary injuries because it is blatantly unconstitutional. Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment provides that the United States shall not “assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States. . .but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void.” So the Acting Attorney General and everybody who thinks they are getting a big jackpot payoff this week should understand any such payment to people who participated in Trump’s insurrection on January 6, for which he was impeached for inciting by the House of Representatives, is illegal and void, meaning that this money belongs to the taxpayers of America, the people of the United States, and we will get that money back.
No, my friends, the Southern Poverty Law Center is not perpetuating a fraud against America by monitoring violent extremists. The Trump Administration is perpetuating a fraud against America by taking $1.8 billion of our money from the United States Judgment Fund for the payment of actual court judgments and damages, and without any legal authorization by Congress, using it to freely pay off his once and future private militia of racist extremists. No one is fooled by all the counterfeit outrage and finger-pointing at the people who have been combatting, with a lot of courage, racial terror in America. Donald Trump has, at best, done nothing to help but in fact inflamed racism, antisemitism and the extremist groups.
Mr. Chairman, the threat is not the SPLC. The real fraud is coming from the White House. Just yesterday, the New York Times reported that the career lawyers in the IRS chief counsel's office believed that Donald Trump's lawsuit is deeply flawed and could be easily defeated. And they drafted a memo advising the DOJ to dismiss it. Of course, instead, the DOJ entered into the $1.8 billion settlement. The general counsel for the Treasury Department, Brian Morrissey, the top lawyer, resigned on the same day this settlement was announced. We've got many questions for everybody involved in this brazen and corrupt transaction.
Mr. Chair, pursuant to clause 2(k)(6) of rule 11, I move that the committee subpoena those involved in the creation or execution of this nearly $1.8 billion slush fund: 1) Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, 2) Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, 3) Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, 4) IRS Chief Executive Officer Frank Bisignano, and 5) Treasury Department General Counsel Brian Morrissey.
Mr. Blanche orchestrated this outrageous slush fund as part of the settlement with Donald Trump, which was also signed by Mr. Woodward, and Mr. Bessent will oversee the payout of the DOJ funds. Mr. Bisignano signed off on this settlement for the IRS, and Brian Morrissey remarkably resigned just as this deal was being announced.
These individuals possess important insight into Trump’s self-dealing with his own federal agencies to create a fund to pay and reward his supporters and friends.