Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a member of the House committee investigating the Capitol riot, sounded an alarm on NBC’s Meet the Press this weekend about the threat posed by former President Donald Trump’s behavior. That threat, Raskin made clear, hasn’t vanished.
Asked about particular recent statements Trump made regarding what’s under investigation by the riot panel, Raskin said:
‘He’s essentially saying, yeah I did it and I’ll do it again, which is what we have been contending all along that if you allow impunity for attempts at unconstitutional seizures of power, which is what a coup is, then you’re inviting it again in the future. And to be a strong, self-sustaining, self-respecting democracy, we can’t allow people to decide that they are above the law and that they are more important than our constitutional processes.’
Check out Raskin’s remarks below:
Raskin on Meet the Press on Trump continuing to attack Pence: "He's essentially saying, yeah I did it and I'll do it again … if you allow impunity for attempts at unconstitutional seizures of power, which is what a coup is, then you're inviting it again in the future." pic.twitter.com/PvcZTOgVRN
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 19, 2022
At a recent event of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Trump said the following about former Vice President Mike Pence: “Mike was afraid of whatever he was afraid of. But as you heard a year and a half ago, Mike Pence had absolutely no choice but to be a human conveyor belt. He was a human conveyor belt. Even if the votes were fraudulent, they said he had to send the votes, couldn’t do anything.” Trump, to be clear, wasn’t acknowledging the legitimacy of statements about the limits on what Pence could have done in his role overseeing the certification in Congress of the presidential election outcome; he was mocking them. The hope ahead of that post-2020 election certification of the results was for Pence to somehow block Biden’s win while leading the proceedings, but the then-VP didn’t have the legally recognized power to take that move.
Trump is also freaking out on his alternative social media platform Truth Social about the work of the riot panel in the House. In a Sunday post, Trump said, referencing the riot committee: “The highly partisan Unselects are trying to create a FAKE narrative, for whatever reason but only with evil intention, that “He (me) knew he lost the Election.” This is completely false. I felt the Election was RIGGED & STOLLEN, have from the very beginning, & have only gotten stronger in that belief with time & large amounts of additional evidence and proof. In my mind I have, & HAVE HAD, NO QUESTION, and MANY people would be willing to so attest, but the Unselects don’t want to hear them.” There remains no real-world evidence for Trump’s stolen election claims — and as he keeps pushing them, he sounds just more unhinged.
At a previous public hearing of the riot committee, vice chair Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) accused Trump of encouraging Pence to perpetrate illegal conduct. “What the president wanted the vice president to do was not just wrong. It was illegal and unconstitutional,” Cheney said. “Vice President Pence understood that his oath of office was more important than his loyalty to Donald Trump. He did his duty. President Trump unequivocally did not.” More public hearings of the riot committee are coming in the near future.
