There is perhaps no one in Congress who is a more comprehensive constitutional expert than Rep. Jamie Raskin.
After Rep. Raskin tried to get Rep. Elect Adelita Grijalva sworn in and was rebuffed during a pro-forma House session, Raskin and Grijalva joined House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a press conference, where he was providing his daily update on the government shutdown.
The threat on the life of Rep. Jeffries (D-NY) by a 1/6 criminal that Trump pardoned seemed to deeply disturb Raskin who said:
Up until Donald Trump, the pardon process was governed by Department of Justice rules, by statute, and of course by the Constitution. And there was a very set pattern, which is each pardon application was considered on its own. It was analyzed what exactly that person had done. What they were convicted of, and up until Donald Trump, nobody had ever been pardoned who had not paid back in restitution to their victims off a crime or paid back fines to the government.
In other words, you had to have made yourself completely whole. Then you had to demonstrate that you were rehabilitated, that you accepted the reality of your offense. Now, contrast that with what happened with Trump. He gets in on his first day in office without any reports from the pardon attorney about any of these people, any recommendations saying that they have paid off their restitution. They’ve paid their fines. They’ve they’ve made peace with their victims and so on. They’ve apologized to the police.
No, none of that had happened. Instead, they issued a blanket pardon for everybody who had stormed the Capitol and participated in the shocking and atrocious events of January 6th.
So what do you have in that mix? You have people who have been convicted before for domestic violence, for assault, for armed robbery, you name it, drug dealing, gun dealing. All of that’s in there. And what do you know after this mass Pardon happens? People start getting picked up again.
There’s a guy down in Richmond who was burglarizing all of the houses in his neighborhood, and now this guy. Moynihan says he’s gonna eliminate the minority leader of the United States House of Representatives. So they have enough people over at the Department of Justice who know a lot about January 6th, including Ed Martin, who was there tweeting on that day, describing it as a day of celebration like Mardi Gras and his senior advisor, Jared Wise, who was here yelling, kill him about the police, that they should know how to get these people into line because it’s a very dangerous situation.
Raskin was setting the stage for what he was about to say to Johnson, which you can read and watch below.
