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WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on Oversight
Hearing on “Entering the Golden Age: Ending the Weaponization of the Justice Department”
February 25, 2025

Last Congress, the Committee sent over 150 letters to the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That’s more than two a week for every week we’re in session.

Your breathless investigation into desert mirages didn’t yield much evidence of “weaponization,” but I have good news for you even though it’s terrible news for America. 

Like the rest of the Elon Musk-infested government, the Department of Justice and the FBI are now filled with actual scandalous corruption and weaponized lawlessness.  

It’s only been 36 days since the beginning of this administration, but we already have a thick report we’re releasing today on the violations of law and the Constitution that have taken place, the early misdeeds of the Trump Administration DOJ.

It’s true the courts have issued more than 20 temporary restraining orders and injunctions against all the chaos, but we cannot maintain a demure silence, Mr. Chairman, about the shocking weaponized corruption overtaking the Department of Justice in the first four weeks of this administration.

Just ten days ago, seven career prosecutors resigned in protest rather than carry out a corrupt and lawless order from the Acting Deputy Attorney General—and former Donald Trump defense attorney—Emil Bove. He ordered prosecutors in the Southern District of New York to dismiss for totally political reasons a major public corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, who had been charged by a unanimous grand jury in a detailed 57-page indictment with five felony counts of criminal bribery and soliciting illegal campaign contributions. Trump ordered DOJ to withdraw the Grand Jury indictment because Adams had traveled to Mara-Lago and agreed to back Trump’s political agenda in return.

The interim U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon resigned rather than make her storied office party to this corrupt bargain. She refused to enable favoritism towards, and selective non-prosecution of, a politician who had been indicted for serious bribery and conspiracy charges. Nor would she participate in Mr. Bove’s project to cover up the details of this dirty deal.  

Ms. Sassoon is a Republican with impeccable credentials in the conservative movement, a member of the Federalist Society and a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Scalia, a jurist whom I know the Chairman has repeatedly praised.  

Like dominoes falling, Ms. Sassoon’s forced resignation triggered a cascade of further resignations as six other veteran prosecutors refused in turn to take part in this lawless bargain. These officials included the acting head of the Criminal Division, several leaders of DOJ’s Public Integrity Section, and the lead prosecutor on the case from SDNY, Hagan Scotten, a decorated veteran and another Republican with impeccable right-wing credentials who could not stomach the thought of joining the plot and said in a letter for the ages that it would take a “fool” or a “coward” to do so.  

The next day, Bove demanded the career prosecutors in the Public Integrity Section “volunteer” one lawyer to sign this disgraceful dismissal order or there would be a mass firing of them all. One lawyer set to retire agreed to sign the dismissal to protect his colleagues from this outrageous threat of collective punishment. 

This eye-popping sellout of public integrity and public safety in New York was not even a secret. On the contrary, in a Fox News interview, Tom Homan, the Administration’s Border Czar, sat next to Mayor Adams and explicitly referred to the corrupt bargain, saying, “If he doesn’t come through, I’ll be back in New York City. And we won’t be sitting on a couch. I’ll be in his office, up his butt, saying where the hell is the agreement we came to?”  

Last Friday, the judge in the case at least provisionally refused to accept the dirty deal, instead appointing an independent monitor, Republican Paul Clement, to evaluate what should be done with the now orphaned 5-count criminal corruption indictment.  

Mr. Chairman, these facts are shocking: blatant corruption, cover-up, mass resignations, threats, coercion. As you like to say, “it’s much worse than we thought.”  

Surely this toxic “sweetheart deal” demands a Committee inquiry. It looks infinitely worse to me than the flotsam and jetsam you examined with the intensity of Lieutenant Columbo in the last Congress.   

But you’ve asked no questions, written no letters, demanded no briefings, issued no subpoena.    

How come? Why did the cat catch your tongue?

And this mess provides just a little whiff of the raw sewage already overpouring at DOJ.

They sacked dozens of professional career prosecutors with superior credentials and evaluations simply for doing their jobs when assigned to work on the January 6 investigation. These people must get their jobs back under the Civil Service rules, which allow dismissal and discipline only for poor performance or professional misconduct. But the Majority hasn’t uttered a peep wondering about how such an appalling violation of law and professional ethics came to pass. 

Why not?

Last Congress, you zealously investigated the DOJ for allegedly hiring and firing employees based on political ideology. Nothing came of it.  

But now DOJ has openly fired dozens of career prosecutors for the sole reason that they worked on January 6 insurrection cases—in other words, for doing their jobs on a case Donald Trump now considers uncomfortable for him.  

How is that remotely acceptable?

Even Trump said the prosecutions were necessary in the immediate wake of the vicious mass premeditated attack on our police, our Congress and our Constitution. 

On January 7, 2021, Trump called it a “heinous attack,” and said: “The demonstrators who infiltrated the Capitol have defiled the seat of American democracy. To those who engaged in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”

Well, the only people paying now after his pardons are the prosecutors and FBI agents they’re going after for doing their jobs. Because Donald Trump thinks it’s too much truth.

Now, in an act of Orwellian historical revisionism that would make Joseph Stalin blush, Trump’s team wants to punish hard-working professional prosecutors, FBI agents and civil servants for doing the job that even Trump said they had to do. 

If this is not weaponization of DOJ, what is, Mr. Chairman? It’s far worse than the imaginary things you floated last Congress that led nowhere. When will we have a hearing on what is taking place for real in the Department of Justice right now?

They’ve hollowed out the career leadership ranks at DOJ, ravaging the offices that prosecute terrorism and public corruption. 

Now America meets Ed Martin, the new U.S. Attorney in D.C., who has already proven himself to be to legal ethics what Robert Kennedy Jr. is to public health. Mr. Martin is an election denier who participated in the festival of anti-police and anti-democracy violence on January 6, which he joyfully likened to Mardi Gras, and until recently—very recently, even into his term of office—has been a defense lawyer of record for numerous January 6 mob defendants.  

After taking control of the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office, he fired dozens of prosecutors who prosecuted January 6 rioters. But DOJ ethics rules plainly require that Mr. Martin recuse himself because of this glaring conflict of interest created by his ongoing representation of private plaintiffs being prosecuted by the government. But naturally the Trump DOJ had forced out the senior ethics official Brad Weinsheimer who would have ruled on the matter, and replaced him with two inexperienced political appointees who apparently think it’s ok not just for the fox to guard the henhouse but for the fox to simultaneously represent other foxes in court who have already ravaged the hen house. 

Mr. Martin has literally made filings on both sides of a January 6 case, as defense counsel for participants in the riot and now as a prosecutor dismissing the charges against the same defendants he was representing.

When will there be a hearing on this? This is taking place right now. 

The list goes on. We don’t have time to go through everything that’s already happened, but I would encourage the Chairman to please check out our report.

This hearing is entitled “Entering the Golden Age: Ending the Weaponization at the Department of Justice,” a title that comes just in time to help America celebrate the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live.  

Perhaps you’re referring to a Golden Age for corrupt billionaires, lawless oligarchs and violent white nationalists. It’s no golden age for the DOJ, which is now mired in corruption, halting corruption prosecutions, disbanding anticorruption task forces, and purging veteran prosecutors and agents who are dedicated to public safety and have superior performance evaluations but run afoul of the new deranged right-wing political correctness.   

Chairman Jordan has championed using our power under Article I to ensure that the DOJ upholds the rule of law for all, without fear or favor. Good for him. I don’t need to quote your eloquent speeches on the subject. We know them well. 

So I ask you just to be true to our own beautiful words. Let’s not use our oversight power selectively. Let’s investigate these startling developments so dangerous to justice in America.

Let’s start with the dirty deal with Mayor Adams, which has now put a giant worm in the Big Apple. Mr. Chairman, I would invite you to join us in sending this letter today to Attorney General Bondi demanding specific answers on her shocking abuse of prosecutorial power, the shocking abuse of prosecutorial power that is taking place at DOJ in the whole Mayor Adams matter, and I would think that the Committee should move very quickly to have a hearing on this next week. 

Thank you for your indulgence, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.