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WATCH  Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on Oversight
Hearing on “Inside the Biden FBI: Waste, Fraud, Abuse, and a Bureau 
Leadership in Decline”
April 2, 2025

Mr. Chairman, thank you very much and thanks to Ms. Crockett for calling us together. 

We are already 10 weeks into the Trump Administration and still, the Republicans are recycling the most tiresome, vacuous and debunked stories, conspiracy theories, about the Biden Administration, while demurely declining to conduct any oversight at all of the current administration.

And I agree with the Chairman of the full committee, Mr. Jordan: It is day and night, but I think he’s seeing day and night backwards. Donald Trump is turning our country into a gangster state where agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the FBI and the Department of Justice act as presidential enforcers, conducting political deals with elected officials like New York City Mayor Adams, corporate shakedowns against ABC, CBS, and other media entities, and law firms like Paul Weiss, WilmerHale, and Jenner & Block, demanding pledges of loyalty from citizens, and in some cases, demanding cold, hard cash in lawsuits brought directly by the President against private businesses. Meanwhile, they’re offering mass pardons, immunity, and protection to violent insurrectionists, convicted cop beaters, drug traffickers, corrupt politicians—as long as they’re willing to kiss the ring and do the president’s bidding. 

Let’s look at how this administration is treating the honest men and women of the FBI. In his first days in office, Trump targeted thousands of FBI agents simply for doing their jobs after the mob violence of January 6, 2021, and holding the cop beaters and insurrectionist rioters accountable. FBI agents had to sue to stop this purge and block them from publicly releasing their names to the violent militias like Oath Keepers and Proud Boys whom President Trump had already given pardons to. And those pardons, by the way, this Department of Justice are extending to other crimes these people have committed, including cocaine trafficking and gun charges.

This administration isn’t opposing corruption. It’s opening the door wide open to corruption every single day for his friends. Donald Trump ordered the FBI to stop conducting background investigations of top White House officials. Why?

He disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, charged with identifying and combating maligned foreign influence operations targeting the United States. Why? He suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and reduced enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, just two days after it was reported that Director Kash Patel had engaged in lucrative consulting work for Qatar and for a Vladimir Putin-connected foreign arms conglomerate.

The current FBI leadership is diverting the FBI’s resources away from public safety and national security and towards MAGA conspiracy fixations and obsessions. According to press reports, hundreds of agents ordinarily assigned to defending the national security of the United

States have been pulled into a mind-boggling effort where they were pulling all-nighters and working around the clock to review the Epstein files after Attorney General Bondi botched the first attempt at what she said was going to be a complete release of the Epstein files. So it’s important to consider what the FBI is not investigating in the frenzy of all these “Back to the Future” wild goose chases. 

They’re not investigating Signalgate, the extraordinary decision by a group of America’s highest national security officials—including one who was in Moscow at the Kremlin at the time—to compromise the safety of our service members and intelligence officers by using Signal—a  non-secure commercial application to reveal specific confidential and classified details about an impending military air strike, complete with time stamps for when F-18 aircraft would launch and arrive at their targets, and when Tomahawk missiles would be fired at buildings controlled by Houthi members. 

What are DOJ and FBI doing to investigate this stunning, dangerous episode of incompetence or recklessness, at the very least, that undoubtedly violates all kinds of federal criminal and civil laws? Nothing. In fact, when asked about the signal chat, Attorney General Bondi changed the subject to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. Sound familiar? That’s what we’re doing today. Just a week after the story broke about this tremendous security breach, she said “case closed.” No further investigation, no lessons learned, no hearings. That’s the end. Can you imagine what they would be doing if that had happened under President Biden? If his top national security team had been talking about a military strike on Signal? There would be 8 special committees and subcommittees investigating and they’d all be demanding impeachment, the way they’re demanding impeachment of judges who blow the whistle on the illegalities of this administration. 

Well, what else is the FBI not investigating? Elon Musk, his startling ties to the Communist Party of China, the CCP. Musk is bulldozing our federal government while accessing the people’s most sensitive databases, and he’s traveled to China multiple times in the last several years and met with at the highest-level Communist Party officials. He’s continued to open factories in China, where he does half of his business, even as he works as a “special government employee” to dismantle and destroy our federal government. Can you imagine if President Biden had done that, what our colleagues would be saying? 

In this new state that we’re in, the FBI is not here to enforce the law. It exists to allow the president to shake down businesses and individuals, offering them protection and immunity if they comply and persecution if they don’t. 

The administration installed as the head of the FBI Kash Patel, known for being the man who will do anything for Trump. They also installed his Deputy Director, Dan Bongino, a far-right podcaster and conspiracy theorist who boasted in 2018 that his “entire life right now is about owning the libs.” His appointment was a particular betrayal of Patel’s promise that he would appoint a deputy director who would be an “on-board, active Special Agent as has been the case for 117 years.”  

Already stories of intimidation and pressure in this DOJ in this FBI are trickling out. Seven veteran prosecutors were forced to resign rather than take part in a corrupt bargain to dismiss charges that were brought by a grand jury in New York against the Mayor of New York, Erric Adams. The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Danielle Sassoon, who clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Scalia and was active in the Federalist Society, resigned, saying nothing had changed in the facts of the case, nothing had changed in the law of the case, nothing had changed in the evidence. It was simply this political deal that Donald Trump had cooked up with the Mayor of New York who traveled down to Mar-a-Lago. The longtime criminal chief in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s office was forced to resign rather than open the current bogus investigation into Biden-era clean energy projects.

What we see at the Trump FBI and DOJ is part of a broad pattern. They’re targeting lawyers who took up causes or clients that Donald Trump doesn’t like, and they’ve issued illegal executive orders intended as threats against them. The president and his friends are threatening federal judges that ruled against them to halt their blatantly illegal executive actions, calling for impeachment of the judges, and there have been threats against their families made online. 

The president and his friends are threatening journalists and deporting legal immigrants for exercising their First Amendment rights, sending a clear message to anyone thinking of speaking up against the administration. 

The FBI’s leadership are threatening to take the FBI down a very dangerous path today, one that’s entirely incompatible with the values of the men and women of the FBI and the best traditions of the agency. 

Once again, with today’s hearing, my colleagues are turning a blind eye to what’s going on right now, choosing instead to regurgitate and recycle debunked and discredited lies about the Biden Administration and somebody having an investigation into parents and school boards—that’s been debunked a million times. That was an investigation into people making violent death threats against school board members. Nobody was ever arrested. Nobody was ever charged with anything, and yet they’ve been dining out on that, I think it’s for five years now, talking about something that led nowhere, and there was nothing wrong with it in the first place.

So, the men and women of the FBI deserve to know that Congress is watching and we’ve got your back. We’re not going to stand idly by while this administration tries to turn the FBI into an arm of a pay-to-play gangster state. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.