There is perhaps no one in Congress who is a more comprehensive constitutional expert than Rep. Jamie Raskin.
After Rep. Raskin attempted to administer the oath of office to Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva and was rebuffed during a pro forma session of the House, Raskin and Grijalva joined House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at a press conference, where he provided a daily update on the government shutdown.
The threat on the life of Representative Jeffries (Democrat of New York) by a criminal 1/6 pardoned by Trump seemed to deeply disturb Raskin who said:
Until Donald Trump, the pardon process was governed by Department of Justice rules, by law and of course by the Constitution. And there was a very established pattern, whereby each request for pardon was considered individually. We analyzed what exactly this person had done. What they were found guilty of, and until Donald Trump, no one had ever been pardoned unless they repaid their victims for a crime or paid fines to the government.
In other words, you must have made a full recovery. You then had to demonstrate that you were rehabilitated, that you accepted the reality of your crime. Now compare that with what happened with Trump. He arrives on his first day in office with no report from the pardon attorney on any of these people, no recommendation that they have paid their restitution. They paid their fines. They made peace with their victims, etc. They apologized to the police.
No, none of that had happened. Instead, they issued a blanket pardon to all those who stormed the Capitol and participated in the shocking and atrocious events of January 6.
So what do you have in this mix? There are people who have already been convicted of domestic violence, assault, armed robbery, etc., drug trafficking, firearms trafficking. It’s all in there. And what do you know after this mass pardon? People are starting to be questioned again.
There’s a guy in Richmond who used to burglarize every house in his neighborhood, and now this guy. Moynihan says he’s going to take out the minority leader of the U.S. House of Representatives. So there are enough people at the Justice Department who know a lot about January 6th, including Ed Martin, who was there tweeting that day, describing it as a day of celebration like Mardi Gras and his senior adviser, Jared Wise, who was here yelling, kill him about the police, that they should know how to bring these people to heel because it’s a very dangerous situation.
Raskin was setting the stage for what he was about to tell Johnson, which you can read and watch below.