I Confronted Congress About Trump's $1.8b Fraud

Ajouté : 2026-06-05

[00:00:00]There is rife illegality and that illegality needs to be punished.

[00:00:03]>> Everything that he wants to do is to decapitate our constitutional democratic order and replace it with a monarchy.

[00:00:11]>> Look, if you're watching this channel, you probably know that this is the most corrupt presidential administration in modern history. But the question is, what can anyone do about it? Our options are limited. But I wanted to go straight to the source of people who actually can do something about it, and that is members of Congress. So to find out what can be done, what should be done, and what is happening both in public and behind the scenes, I interviewed and some would say cornered former constitutional law professor, former lead house impeachment manager during the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump, and current Congressman Jamie Raskin. Congressman Raskin, thanks so much for joining us again.

[00:00:45]>> Hey Devin, psyched to be with you. I don't know about you, but I am absolutely furious. But I feel like it's sort of surreal where someone's just going to wake me up from a bad dream and say, "No, of course the president would not create a multi-billion dollar slush fund to pay his friends and uh private army." How are how are you feeling about things these days?

[00:01:05]>> Well, you would definitely be dreaming if you thought that he wouldn't do that because he has done it and it seems uh very much within his character. Um, but I think that we all can wake up from the nightmare and say that more and more of America is appalled. Look, if he can just out of the blue create a $1.776 billion political slush fund, why can't he just wake up and create a $ 1.776 trillion slush fund? In other words, why can't he bankrupt what's left of the American nation uh if he doesn't have to pay attention to the fact that it's Congress which establishes programs and appropriates money. It's the courts that decides cases and controversies. Uh he's limited to his salary in office under the domestic imalments clause and cannot pay himself a dollar beyond his official salary. And you can't fund insurrection.

[00:02:03]It's right there in section four of the 14th amendment that neither the United States nor the states shall assume or pay any debt or obligation for the purposes of insurrection or rebellion.

[00:02:14]So it's hard to imagine a more unconstitutional thing than what he's done here.

[00:02:19]>> Yeah. Well, unfortunately, I think that there may be people in this country that think that what you just described sounds like a good time. One point that we have harped on on this channel about this settlement fund is that while Todd Blanch has publicly stated they are going to pull assuming uh you know less than $1.8 billion you know in the settlement agreement itself it does not have a statement of how much they're going to pay out. Uh I mean there's not even cases. These are just people that they want to pay out. Is there anything other than Todd Blanch's word to believe that it would be limited to approximately $1.8 billion?

[00:02:58]>> No, there's no legality to it. There's no legal oversight. There's no congressional oversight. Uh there will be a quarterly report, confidential report made to the attorney general by the attorney general's designates, all of them subject completely to the will of Donald Trump. It's just a monarchical arrangement that they've got there and it's got nothing to do with our constitutional order or law. It's totally outside of our constitution. And you know, in a way it's sort of clever because the way that the government is supposed to work is that um Congress passes an appropriation which funds certain projects. And theoretically, the executive branch should not be able to use any funds that are not appropriated by Congress. And over time, the Department of Justice needed to uh be able to pay out funds as part of legitimate settlements. And so in I guess it was 1957, there was this judgment fund that was created that was an ongoing appropriation. And it does not itself contain any limits on uh how many funds can be appropriated. I guess there is a a uh an you know an evil cleverness to you know claiming that they are using funds from an ongoing appropriation but is what they're doing comply with that law.

[00:04:22]>> I mean in his inimitable way Donald Trump scopes out the situation for any pot of money and then figures out how to transform it into a political or personal slush fund for himself. So this is not the only time this has happened.

[00:04:36]I mean this is happening throughout the government. The board of peace uh is funded now by $1.5 billion stolen from the department of state which had been set aside for disaster relief. Then that was added to a billion dollars from the Saudis and a billion from the Qataris and a billion from the United Arab Emirates. Then it got registered by the director of the US patent and trade uh trademark office uh Mr. Squires.

[00:05:05]>> Is it a public entity? the board of peace or is it a private entity?

[00:05:08]>> Uh, at this point I'm not sure if it's formed or not. We acted as a custodian so that they could have the market.

[00:05:14]>> How do you The Board of Peace is a public entity. It's a governmental organization even though Congress has not created it.

[00:05:20]>> Is that right, >> sir? I I don't know the status of whether it's an entity formed or not.

[00:05:25]>> We don't know anything about it except that Donald Trump is the chairman for life. uh he pronounced himself the chairman for life and he took $1.5 billion from us again in blatant violation of the domestic emalments clause um and Congress's power over the purse.

[00:05:42]>> Yeah, this is obviously an ongoing uh trend whether it's uh the board of peace uh money that was uh I guess you'd call it reappropriated, the money coming from Venezuelan oil, the tax funds coming from tariffs. My worry is that when we talk about these things and we say this is really important stuff that it's only Congress that is allowed to appropriate funds and the executive branch can neither deny funds that have been appropriated nor can it use funds that have not been appropriated. Can you explain to someone why that is so important for our system? Well, the our uh revolutionary forebears were rebelling against the king and in a monarchy, the king draws on the funds of the government of the kingdom for personal purposes. There's no difference between what the king wants to do personally and what the king wants to do uh for the state. Leasa, right? He is the state. And that's exactly what Donald Trump wants to do. He wants to drain away all of the resources of the people, of the government, the tax resources into different privately controlled personal political slush funds for him. You know, when he had the hit on Venezuela, then they set up a bank account to receive the profits from Venezuelan oils. I believe that's in Qatar. There's no public regulation scrutiny. There's no law there. And so this is why we have a movement of tens of millions of people across the country saying no kings and everything that he wants to do is to essentially decapitate our constitutional democratic order and replace it with a monarchy.

[00:07:34]>> Yeah, that uh that sounds bad. Um, so given that there is this uh ongoing appropriation for the judgment fund and their argument through uh acting attorney general Todd Blanch is that Congress has appropriated this starting in the ' 50s and and uh removing capsu later on in the '60s. How does this settlement violate the law with respect to that appropriation and with respect to the law in general? The settlement is a fraud on the court and it is a fraud on the country. Let's start with this.

[00:08:07]The IRS lawyers on this particular case were very clear that number one, the case brought by Donald Trump was outside the statute of limitations. It was many months late from when it should have come in. two, if it had come in within the two-year statute of limitations, which it didn't, it would also be barred because the IRS had won a series of cases um exactly analogous to this one where people's private tax information was released by a third party government contractor and the court said that the federal government is not liable for that. So, the guy who leaked the tax returns Donald Trump had promised to reveal and disclose the way every other president had uh went to jail for disclosing them. Uh and and rightfully so. Um he was punished for that. But there's no private right of action. And the courts had serially rejected people in Trump's situation who said they wanted to get paid for it. So, uh, Attorney General Blanch betrayed his job as the lawyer for the American people by not raising the obvious onpoint precedent that other people in Trump's situation had been rejected and repudiated when they said they wanted to get paid in a similar situation when a private contractor violated um, you know, the confidentiality of their of their tax returns. Now, before we continue, my interview with Representative Raskin would not have been possible without the support of today's sponsor, Y Refi. Because Y Refi is here to help anybody with student loan debt that doesn't have access to Trump's illegal slush fund money. If your private student loans are in default or you're struggling with payments, YIFI is an excellent refinancing solution. Monthly payments are built around what you can actually afford. Rates are fixed from 1% to 5.99%, so you never have to guess what your payment will be each month, which is basically unheard of for private student loans. There's no minimum FICO score required. Bad credit will never disqualify you and they even offer a skip 12 program if you ever need to skip payments for any reason. And if you have a parent or co-signer on your student loans, Y refi can help with that too through their co-signy release program.

[00:10:21]Plus, you can always talk to a real human in the United States whenever you call. Refinancing with Y refi could save you thousands to tens of thousands of dollars over the course of your student loan repayment. And it can give you an invaluable piece of mind for fixed low monthly payments. So click or scan to talk to Yi today or I'll see you in court. And now on to my next question for Representative Raskin. Todd Blanch famously just before working for government was and I would argue still is ethically bound to be private citizen Donald Trump's attorney. Isn't he conflicted out of handling cases where Donald Trump is suing in his individual capacity as he was in this case?

[00:10:56]>> Well, I think that's another problem. I mean, you could say that's a secondary or tertiary problem. I mean, another thing that Blanch should have done had he actually been acting as an advocate and a lawyer for the Department of Justice and for the American people rather than an attorney for Donald Trump is he would have gotten the case dismissed on the grounds that was that were being raised by the judge in the case. The judge was saying, "What I want this to be argued about right now is whether there is um sufficient adversity or adversary dynamics between the plaintiff Donald Trump and the defendant, the IRS, Department of Justice, and Donald Trump." and she was extremely suspicious and rightfully so that there was any real uh adversary relationship but in fact this was a a collusive lawsuit leading up to the collusive settlement.

[00:11:59]So had he done his job and exercised any kind of independence of judgment, he would have accepted the judge's invitation to say no, there is not sufficient uh adversary relationship, therefore this is collusive, therefore Donald Trump doesn't have standing. But he didn't do that. He made the contrary argument. I think that people who are not lawyers uh miss out on the importance of the fact that this judge was worried that the justice department could not effectively sue itself or Donald Trump could not sue himself. So she appointed Amiki to explore that that issue and that if it is a collusive lawsuit which you can't have in an American court effectively the whole thing is void abinio. void from the very beginning. And you know the uh attorney general and department of justice is bound by the statute that created the judgment fund which requires um settle compromise settlements and you can't you can't have a compromise settlement if there's no real lawsuit there or at least that's the argument that several have put forward and I find persuasive.

[00:13:08]>> Another way to look at it is it was always a compromised lawsuit and the compromise was Donald Trump got whatever he wanted. I mean, he makes a bizarre champion for the idea that there is any kind of analytical separation between Donald Trump uh the private citizen and Donald Trump the president over the attorney general and the IRS because he insists otherwise on the unitary executive theory of government which is that everybody in the executive branch reports exclusively solely and absolutely to the president. So on the one hand, he's saying everything flows to me. I'm in charge of everything that goes on the executive branch. On the other hand, I can sue the executive branch and the IRS and the Department of Justice can somehow be goodfaith, honest, broker actors on behalf of the public interest. I mean, give us a break. The fact that um Blanch refused to accept the judge's invitation to have the suit thrown out demonstrates that he's acting as Donald Trump's lawyer.

[00:14:10]>> Yeah. Well, I will see your uh your paradox and raise you a paradox or or contradiction. This lawsuit was filed only in Donald Trump's name as an individual. And yet um the people who are putitively supposed to be paid out include myriad third parties including you know the the January 6ers who uh you know rioted in broke into the capital.

[00:14:33]Um, and on top of it, it also purports to include the settlement of Donald Trump, his family, and his business's tax related issues, which also were not part of the lawsuit that this purports to to settle. Um, that that that all seems wrong.

[00:14:49]>> Uh, another way to look at this, I mean, this is like in some sense the greatest uh legal issue spotter of all time for a final law exam. I mean, in in this one corrupt political slush fund, you have um more than a dozen. I just I just wrote something that I'm going to put out later today on the top 10 forms of uh constitutional, legal, and criminal violation in this thing. But it's really there dozens of them. But here's another one. There's a federal law which prohibits the president of the United States from interfering in uh the settlement of a conflict around someone's taxes. The president can neither shut down an IRS investigation nor insist on the launching of an IRS investigation. But what is that provision you just referenced if it's not the president saying, "Oh, all of these things that you may have against members of the Trump family and Trump businesses um are immediately going to be shut down as part of my settlement."

[00:15:51]Where does the president get the authority to do that when there's a federal law specifically preventing him from doing that?

[00:15:57]>> I worry that uh the Supreme Court would say, "Well, that's not a power that Congress has to be able to cabin the executive uh to prevent that." But um as you said, that's sort of a a secondary problem with all of the the other problems.

[00:16:13]>> Yeah. Um you know, we we we should say a word though about the domestic imalments clause, you know, in article two- which says that the president is limited to his official salary in office and cannot receive a single dollar from the United States or any state while in office. You know, when Trump settles a lawsuit by Trump against the government, he's essentially handing himself $1.776 billion dollars that he is going to be able to distribute however he wants. And there's no law there. Of course, they don't have to find that any law has been violated. Of course, it wouldn't be their role to do that anyway. That's what the courts are for. But there just has to be some vague sense that somebody's feelings got hurt because of the words weaponization and lawfare which are not defined anywhere in federal or state law. They just don't exist. So I mean like that's something that exists on Fox News, but it's not part of the American uh legal institutions, >> right? In in some sense we've all sort of bought into the language that they're using that this will only be only be limited to $1.8 8 billion and that there's been a lot of focus on the fact that you can't or the way that it's written they could absolutely pay out the January 6th uh insurrectionist but none of the language in this thing is limited to that. Um there was recent reporting that they are contemplating uh just funding Republican politicians taking money out of this fund to get people to run for office as Republicans.

[00:17:50]I mean >> well why not? I mean, yeah. I mean, if you flip it over, right? I mean, say a Democratic president, God forbid, were to inherit the anti-weaponization fund, who would you get there? Well, first, all the law firms who were targeted by these illegal unconstitutional executive orders. all of the businesses that were targeted with the illegal unconstitutional tariffs that were imposed on them, all of the colleges and universities uh whose admissions process and faculty hiring process Donald Trump wanted to take over, they would all be there. Certainly the families of um you know, anybody who's been beaten up by ICE would be in there. So, you know, >> it sunsets before the next administration, so that'll happen.

[00:18:34]>> Well, you're right. I guess what what I'm saying is that if you just develop a generalized concept of weaponization and lawfare, which they don't define in any legal sense, but they do refer to Democrat politicians or Democrat policies, then that is nothing other than a partisan slush fund. I there's no other way of understanding. And of course, weaponization isn't their real target. Weaponization is their whole objective. They want to weaponize the government. uh against their perceived political foes.

[00:19:07]>> Yes, there there's nothing anti-weaponization about it. It is a pro-weaponization fund. I mean, that that that takes us to I think the second most important question is how can Congress stop it? How can other third parties stop it? What what can be done?

[00:19:21]>> Well, that that's the challenging question. I mean, we need every other part of the government actually to stand up for the constitutional order, beginning with Congress. It's a a massive violation of our power of the purse. Um, no other withdrawal of money from the federal fisk may be accomplished other than by federal appropriation, meaning a law. It's got to be passed by Congress, originating in the House, going to the Senate, passing the House and the Senate, and then signed into law by the president. That's the only way you get money drawn from the government. And this is obviously um an attempt to distort and violate um a particular fund that's out there that has particular purposes that have been uh distorted and mangled beyond recognition. So we need Congress to use our power of the purse to shut this down immediately and to pass a law forbidding the use of money for any of these purposes. And I introduced legislation to that effect last week shutting down their lawless uh so-called anti-weaponization fund. and preventing any money from the judgment fund going to the president of the United States or going uh because that's unconstitutional. violates the domestic monoluments clause and preventing any money from going to the January 6 insurrectionists and writers because that violates uh section four of the 14th amendment which says that neither the United States nor any state shall pay or assume any debt or obligation set up to pay for insurrection or rebellion against the United States and that's all this is. I mean, I appreciate the legislation, the no taxpayer funded settlement slush fund act, which applies to the president, his cabinet, um certain members of the executive branch, and the January 6th insurrectionists. By its terms, though, it doesn't cover really anyone else that isn't in one of those categories. And I agree that those are sort of the most egregious categories. But even by its terms, you know, if Trump wanted to pay out, you know, a thousand different people who uh were Republican cronies or wanted to run for office or, you know, had done favors in the past, that legislation as written would not necessarily cover uh slush fund payments to them. And on top of it, of course, enforcement of that act would go through the Department of Justice, who is fully captured at this point. And of course, you know, that legislation is never going to pass because the president will veto it.

[00:21:51]>> So, so we we've had the judgment fund for three quarters of a century. And like so many other things in government, it's been working fine up until the Trump administration. Like there had not been issues with it. Nobody was asking questions about it. But because he pounces on any fund that's set up as an opportunity to exploit for his own personal and political and financial gain, now we have to go back and look at what reforms are necessary uh to the judgment fund to make sure that this doesn't happen, that it's not being, you know, raped and pillaged for these other purposes. And we've got to do that as with so many other parts of the government. I mean, we the foreign government emaluments clause had never really been an issue before, but now we've got a guy in office who's taken tens or hundreds of millions, if not billions, we don't know because of the various crypto channels, but certainly tens and hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign governments. Okay? And he's never once come to Congress. the foreign emolments clause that says that the president shall not receive a present and imalument which means a payment in office or title of any kind whatever from a king a prince or a foreign state that he's got a $400 million jet that he just got from Qatar that he's going to keep for the rest of his life. So the money is pouring in from these foreign states. Well, now we've got to go back and legislate. We need to set up a whole legislative architecture to bolster the foreign emolments clause. We've got to say that the president must report to Congress within 72 hours the receipt of any foreign government, money, gift, present, a monument, office, or a title.

[00:23:32]He's got to turn it over. He cannot keep it until Congress has acted and then we've got to make sure that we act within 14 days or 21 days to vote on that. Either he can he can keep it, he can accept it, or it must be turned over to the government of the United States and we send it back or we decide which.

[00:23:49]Look, I mean that's I guess necessary but not sufficient and I don't want to let you know good be or perfect be the enemy of good. That that all sounds good and fine, but I think realistically that law is not going to be uh passed into law or that legislation won't be passed into law until at least 2029 if the Democrats uh retake the White House. Uh because otherwise I don't think there's there's any hope of overriding a veto.

[00:24:15]But what about uh you know legislative investigations, subpoenas? Um obviously the Democrats are the minority party at the moment. It would only take uh three Republican defectors to caucus with the Democrats and many of the Republicans have lost their primaries. Thomas Massie is the first one that comes to mind. Is there any talk of um of a few Republican defectors uh caucusing in this lame duck period to actually uh give subpoena power back to the Democrats? Um well that would be the most sweeping solution if we could create a new bipartisan kind of majority. Um I think that that might be a little ways off. On the other hand, we have working bipartisan majorities as as you've seen on things like the War Powers Act, the Epstein file, and certainly on the slush fund. I think that we're going to be pulling over a lot of Republicans uh on the legislation we just talked about. We could end up doing a discharge petition on that. We got to wait 30 days before the discharge petition ripens and we can uh get people to sign it. But I I believe that we are going to be able to stop this totally illegal and unconstitutional fraud on the court and fraud on the country. And you know whether that leads to a more formal political realignment within Congress, I can't say. Uh I don't know.

[00:25:34]But uh there are certainly a lot of Republicans whose own political plans and dreams have been crushed by Donald Trump. Thomas Massiey's been one of them. I saw one reporter talking to him and saying, "Well, you know, you're no longer going to be in Congress." And he said, "Well, I've got seven more months." So, obviously, these people who Donald Trump has taken on in the primaries to throw his weight around against um are, you know, not going to go quietly. You know, it's interesting that the the press, I think, or some of the press, not you, but some of the press misapprehended what was going on.

[00:26:09]They thought that this was, you know, a huge demonstration of the president's political might, you know, in Louisiana or in Texas and so on. Well, yeah, within the within the Republican party, but meantime, his base of support in the Republican party generally um is shrinking. Um, it's it reminds me of a religious cult which is it's losing membership. People are turning on them.

[00:26:34]They're exposed to the world. And so the cult leader exercises more power internally. Imposes more rules and more orthodoxy and more paranoia on everybody. But meantime, they're shrinking in the world. And I think that's exactly where Donald Trump is. We are beating them in head-to-head races all over America. ties down with Emily Gregory who just became Donald Trump's Democratic state representative for Mara Lago in eastern Palm Beach County. She flipped that district by 21 points. You saw what happened in Virginia with Spanberger, what happened uh Jersey with Mikey Cheryl. All over the country, we are winning these races, which is why they're cracking down um with gerrymandering and then also the internal party discipline.

[00:27:19]>> Yeah. I mean, not to weigh too far into the the politics of it, which is sort of outside of my beat, but it occurs to me that the corruption and illegality is a pretty potent message. Um, it does seem to be breaking through a little bit.

[00:27:34]And, uh, it it does seem to me that that your average American doesn't quite understand the stakes of what has happened so far. I think there's a lot of people who consider this just politics as usual that, you know, every president is corrupt and everyone is self-dealing and everyone engages in some illegality. On a scale from Jimmy Carter to Stalin, where would you put the current actions of this administration in terms of anti-democratic action?

[00:28:00]>> Um, somewhere between Orban and Putin, I would place him. I mean, he he's gone beyond Orban. I mean, Orban also had a purge of the f of his national government the way that Trump did, attacked the rule of law, attacked the judges, and gerrymandered the legislature. Um, but Trump does not yet have the power of Putin, although he clearly relishes it. And Putin is his uh is a role model there. Yeah. The American public, I think, is waking up to the fact that corruption is not a problem in the Trump administration.

[00:28:33]Corruption is the Trump administration.

[00:28:36]That's all it is. It's been a money-making operation from the very beginning. And everything else uh is subordinate to that. They've tried to make the United States government basically a part of Trump Enterprises, a wholly owned subsidiary. And this is why Trump talks about the phony imalments clause. And he's, you know, the only president in our history who never refers to the Constitution. He never talks about the founders. He never talks about history. history begins with him.

[00:29:05]Now, some people think that's just because of his general imbecility and he doesn't understand anything about history, but I think that there's an ideological explanation, too, which is that's the way authoritarians and fascists operate, that the world didn't didn't exist before them. They created it. I >> I I think that's right. Uh and I'll tell you one of my worries, which is that let's say that the Democrats uh win back one or both houses of Congress. um and retake the White House in 2029. What I am worried about is that uh there will be a huge amount of pressure to just pretend that the Trump administ the second Trump administration, let alone the first just never happened and pretend that this is politics unusual and go along uh their way. What if anything is going to be done to punish the people who in this administration, let alone Donald Trump himself, use the P public fisk as their own piggy bank?

[00:30:02]um and you know violated the anti-deficiency act as as easily as they breathed and you know violated the empoundment control act uh you know several times a day like what's going to be done to make sure that this doesn't happen again because I don't see this as an is an issue of backsliding we have backslid the backsliding has already occurred we have to dig ourselves out of a hole that we are already in >> yeah I think all that is exactly right if it were just one guy if it were just Donald Trump um then people might be seduced by the temptation just to forget the whole thing, sweep it under the rug and let go. But it's not just Donald Trump. I mean, there's an entire political apparatus around him. And we have seen the Trumpification and the magification of the Republican party. It's a whole style of governance. And I'm sure there are lots of other billionaires out there who are now figuring out their path to power. They'd like to be able to take over the government and they'd like to be able to make that their next money-making opportunity. So that's why I, you know, began to describe to you some of the things I think that need to take place to uh revive the foreign government imalments clause and the domestic emalments clause. The framers understood that temptation because they saw it with the the monarchies, the plunder that the kings would engage in.

[00:31:17]And we're just talking about 21st century kings who have, you know, infinitely more power and technology at their disposal than the kings had in the 17th and 18th centuries. But it's the same thing. So we will have to engage in all of that. And you know, as for criminal prosecution, like one of the one of the things that's been destroyed by Donald Trump was the wall of separation between the law enforcement function, which was traditionally regarded as independent, and the presidency. We've got to rebuild that wall, and I hope it goes to work, and I hope it does its job. But that's not something we can campaign on because then we're falling into, you know, Donald Trump political psychology, which is the purpose of the government is just to attack your foes to clear them out of the way so you can engage in all the money-making and destruction of democratic and electoral norms that you want.

[00:32:12]>> I mean, as we've seen, uh, the narrative will be out there anyway. I mean, right now, uh, the the Trump administration is planting the narrative that, you know, this anti-weaponization fund is necessary to undo the weaponization of the Biden administration. And, you know, I think anyone who is thinking about things clear-headedly knows that that's just laughable. So, I I'm not sure I I I agree with your point that you can't campaign on it because, at least from my perspective, there is rife illegality and that illegality needs to be punished. And if you don't campaign on it, then that pressure to just pretend it never happened is going to overtake and you know, no one is going to engage in the prosecutions.

[00:32:55]>> Well, then I misspoke. I wasn't saying we don't campaign on corruption. I think that's the the central point of our campaign that we are reviving democratic process and laws and constitutional protections against corruption. They've turned the whole government into a money-making operation and we need to pass all of the laws and rules that we can and we must in order to take our democracy back. But you asked at the end about criminal prosecution of people.

[00:33:23]And yes, we have to revive the prosecutorial function, but we also have to revive the independence of the prosecutorial function. So, I'm not running on the prosecution of any particular person. I am running for the restoration of the rule of law and constitutional values and the right of the prosecutors, the power of the prosecutors to enforce the law.

[00:33:46]>> Well, so there's famously never been a prosecution under the Anti-Deficiency Act, which is the law that prevents the executive branch from committing funds that have not been appropriated. And I would say that of the many things that the Trump administration has done um that are illegal, that is probably the thing that they have done the most.

[00:34:02]Would you support prosecutions of members of the Trump administration who have violated the Anti-Deficiency Act?

[00:34:11]Query whether you can do that to Donald Trump himself given um presidential immunity as uh elicitated by the Supreme Court. Would you support the next administration engaging in criminal prosecutions of violations of the Anti-Deficiency Act?

[00:34:24]>> I suppose if you're asking the question, what would I do if I were attorney general? If I was in the executive branch and we had restored the independence of the the prosecutorial function, I would look at all of the violations of law that took place and use the Department of Justice's rules and their calculations as to what goes into the allocation of law enforcement and prosecutorial resources. And so that I think that that's a very serious transgression against the rule of law and it is a crime to do that. And so if you're asking me as a member of Congress, would I oppose that? Would I think that that is some kind of abuse of power? I don't see where the abuse of power lies there. But and remember the way that we deal with actual abuses of power. If you think that you are the victim of a vindictive prosecution, a political prosecution, a selective prosecution, you bring it up before the court. And sometimes people win on that.

[00:35:26]But not a single one of the January 6 insurrectionists has had their conviction thrown out because of this being a political or partisan or vindictive or selective prosecution. No, they they they didn't need to because they they were pardoned.

[00:35:40]>> Well, but I mean even before that, right? I mean, nobody was able to quash an indictment, nobody was able to get a conviction overturned. They were pardoned, right? Um but so, you know, from the standpoint of somebody who believes that they were engaged in proper action, you could say the system worked for them, right? I would say most Americans consider it an outrageous desecration of the pardon power to pardon all mass 1600 of these people. I mean even uh JD Vance was saying in advance well he's not going to pardon the violent ones you know is he um but you know this was an absolute override of the pardon attorney in the department of justice and the process that had been built up for decades where people actually apply for a pardon. They explain why they've been rehabilitated.

[00:36:30]They explain why they're sorry for what they did. They explain, you know, how there has been contrition, uh, how they've paid their fines and restitution that they owed and so on. And then there'd be a very fine grained analysis and a recommendation to the president.

[00:36:45]All that was out the window. He said, "I just want to pardon all of my political foot soldiers from January 6." There were child molesters in there. There were uh domestic violence abusers in there. There were armed robbers in there. And a lot of them have gone out since he pardoned them and committed crimes.

[00:37:04]>> Sure. I mean, it sounds bad when you say it that way.

[00:37:07]>> You mean when you tell the truth about it? Yeah.

[00:37:08]>> Yeah. Uh I mean, in in in terms of uh future prosecutions of of people that have violated the law under the Trump administration, as far as we know, a lot of this is happening in in broad daylight, so the facts are sort of known. Is anyone keeping a list of all of the things that the Trump administration has done that are illegal and the individuals who are are doing it so that if there is the will that those people can be prosecuted uh when another administration comes to power? Well, I mean, we live in a time when um there's transparency to people's actions and so there are a number of groups that are maintaining all of the transgressions against the Constitution and federal laws. And you know, try as they might to destroy public memory of what took place on January 6th, we have all of the proceedings of the January 6th select committee and we put it out all in public. It's totally uh available. We have a report and it's all televised and so on. So, you know, when these people were pardoned, you could see uh in a lot of the footage exactly what they had done to different officers. Uh and as they go out now and commit other crimes, including uh uh Mr. Johnson, who was pardoned by Trump and then promptly went out and sexually molested a 12-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl. He's been convicted. He's sent back off to prison for life. But in the meantime, these two kids lives have been forever altered by what he did. We we can show you the pictures. We've got all the documents.

[00:38:44]We know exactly who these people are.

[00:38:46]And so we know who he pardoned and we know what kind of crimes they've been committing since he let them out of prison.

[00:38:52]>> Well, yeah. I mean, that applies to the January 6th committee, but the illegality of the second Trump administration goes far, far beyond January 6th and and pardoning them. I understand that there are third parties who are keeping track of of sort of a broad list. Is anyone keeping a list of the people who have effectuated these policies and themselves are subject to um criminal liability such that you know you don't have the same sort of delay that we had with uh Attorney General Garland and the investigation of Trump um during the Biden years. A lot of people are upset that there was so long between the investigation and the prosecution, obviously the what happened with the Supreme Court, but I'm worried that a similar delay uh could lead to a similar result if people aren't keeping track of these things and are aren't ready to go uh as soon as the opportunity arises.

[00:39:46]>> Well, the Supreme Court has been clear that one of the central functions of Congress is to conduct oversight because that's how we know what legislative changes are needed. We have oversight of what's taking place in the government and what's taking place in the country and we are doing everything in our power to exercise oversight despite the fact that the Republican majority is not remotely interested in documenting what's going on in the administration.

[00:40:10]But we continue to talk to whistleblowers. We continue to send letters. I mean, I uh sent a letter over um with uh some other ranking members of different committees about the 1.776 billion slush fund demanding to know who was behind it, who participated in the creation of it, and who's working on it.

[00:40:33]So we we can piece it together and we certainly have our letters uh which will be there as kind of the infrastructure of investigations of the things that need to be looked at and examined and some of the investigative details are there but a lot of them are not as you're saying but that's why we need the gavvels back the the American people have got to get serious about this.

[00:40:56]>> Yeah. Well, from where I sit, a uh a select committee on presidential crime and corruption, uh to compile all of it together, not just uh January 6 related stuff sounds like a pretty good idea.

[00:41:10]Finally, is there any is there any appetite for impeachment proceedings?

[00:41:14]>> The Democrats in Congress today are obviously not afraid of impeachment.

[00:41:18]We've impeached Donald Trump twice. He's gotten uh two of the four presidential impeachments in American history. 50% of them belong to one guy. I led the the team of impeachment managers over to the Senate where we um after he incited a violent insurrection against Congress and his vice president and the union. Um we got a 57 to 43 vote in the Senate, the most sweeping bipartisan result in American history, 10 votes short of a conviction. So impeachment we consider to be a critical tool in our toolbox.

[00:41:55]It's a tool of American popular self-defense against a king who insists against a president who insists on looking acting like a king and engaging in high crimes and misdemeanors like treason and bribery uh against the American people. So impeachment is very much a live instrument in our minds uh both for the president and members of his cabinet. We were making moves towards the impeachment of Christy Gnome when she resigned and towards Attorney General Bondi when she resigned and we will raise it when there are particular outstanding acts of corruption and authoritarianism that constitute high crimes uh and misdemeanors and the same uh with the president that you know I believe the president has committed uh multiple potentially impeachable acts.

[00:42:47]But here here's the key point about this. Impeachment is both a legal and a political remedy. And I say that because the framers considered locating it within the judiciary. They talked about whether impeachment should be something done by the Supreme Court or by uh federal judges. And they said no. They wanted to repose it in the representatives of the people in the House and in the Senate. The House brings forward the charges like a prosecutor and then the Senate sits like judges. Well, what does that tell you?

[00:43:18]It tells you that the framers designed impeachment as a remedy that would be considered along with the entire public and political agenda. And so, it's not illegitimate for us to consider when and where impeachment should be applied given the electoral cycle, given other things that are on the public and political agenda. That's just built into the system. So, some people seem to think that because you identify something impeachable, Donald Trump is done, like he went to war um without Congress declaring war, without any congressional authorization. Once you identify it, well, then you must go ahead and impeach and have a trial and so on. Well, that's not right. It doesn't have to happen immediately. It could happen uh immediately, but we've got to deal with the reality of the political dynamics that exist. And we know that the Republicans right now control the House. They control the Senate. And if we don't have Republicans on our side, well, you know, a bunch of members did bring up impeachment resolutions about that. And then they've got the power to table it, which is exactly what happened. So all of which is to say, yeah, there's a very powerful legal component to impeachment, but that legal component is also inextricably bound up with the political component because it's put into the political branch of government. it's put into article one.

[00:44:44]>> Sure. But I mean, isn't there um a reason to draft articles of impeachment, even if it's not politically reasonable that they're going to pass or even get out of committee, that it it sort of put >> Who said we've not done that?

[00:44:58]>> Well, I I don't think there have been articles related to this slush fund, for example.

[00:45:01]>> Well, articles that that you have, you mean that you How do How do you know?

[00:45:07]>> Well, that Okay, sure. That that are not public.

[00:45:10]>> Yeah. Well, so so there we go. And that's why I say like you uh this is a political question. Like you can't go to court and sue somebody to be impeached or tried and convicted. It's a political question, which means it it's got to be dealt with in the legislative process.

[00:45:26]That's where it exists. That's where it's located.

[00:45:29]>> I I I guess what I'm saying is that publicly authoring articles of impeachment sort of underscores how important some of these things are. And there's no there's no rule that says you can't draft them publicly at one time, bring them later, or even to uh impeach a president on a certain subject matter once, and then impeach them again uh later on. There's no um double jeopardy in that respect, >> right? But but so I mean, put yourself in the position of somebody who's in the minority in Congress. And again, a bunch of my colleagues have done exactly what you're suggesting. They've written up an article of impeachment. It's a privilege resolution. You bring it to the floor and then the majority says we move to table. Then we've voted against the mo motion to table but we lose and so it's tabled. What you need is a winning legislative strategy to make that work.

[00:46:20]That's why uh you know we have to try to move our Republican colleagues and work with our Republican colleagues. We could bring up one of those every day and have it shut down. And maybe there's something to that. I I'm not quite sure.

[00:46:33]Nobody has shown me a strategy that makes that a meaningful uh intervention in the dynamic of of events, you know, unlike a lot of the things we've been able to do. Now, on the other hand, we have had successful we've had impeachment resolutions that have helped to crystallize and catalyze action against Pam Bondi uh against Christy Gnome. But I think it was a lot of the action and are getting ready in the committees to go after them and to build public education campaigns that helped to push them out. We're just staying on offense every single day. And so my point to you is impeachment is a very much a tool in our toolkit even in the minority and we're trying to use it as effectively as we can understanding the limitations of being in the minority.

[00:47:18]>> Congressman Raskin, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you would like to talk about?

[00:47:22]>> No. Thank you for what you're doing in terms of educating the public. Um, we believe that the Trump administration uh is engaged in serious transgressions against the constitutional order and certainly impeachable events uh around this attempt to uh piler $1.776 billion of the taxpayers money to distribute to their political friends and cronies, including uh hundreds and hundreds of whom were convicted of serious offenses like assaulting police officers. a very serious attack on our constitutional order and we've got to do everything in our power to turn it around and use every part of the constitution in that process.

[00:48:04]>> And uh you know obviously it goes without saying that uh being in the minority really hamstrings uh your ability to do all the things that you would like to do. So fingers crossed that um some of the uh the lame duck congress people and senators who uh perhaps they got primaried might actually grow a conscience and and actually do the right thing. But uh hope springs eternal. Thank you so much for being here. Congressman >> hang tough. Thank you so much for having me.

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