Raskin Excoriates Bondi to Her Face in Opening Statement

0:00The Democratic ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, Jamie Raskin, Jamie Raskin, Republicans are refusing to pretty much ask her any questions about Epstein because they've been ordered by Donald Trump and Maga Mike to not ask any questions at all about Epstein. Democrats, of course, are asking Attorney General Pan Bondi questions about a number of other subject matters. The DOJ attacking Donald Trump's political enemies, the DOJ taking orders from Donald Trump to engage in all of this unlawful behavior. We'll be covering that as well, but I want to focus right now on Jamie Raskin's opening statement.

1:03It was powerful. Attorney General Pam Bondi, very passive aggressive. She refused to even look at Jamie Raskin when he was just excoriating her point by point. So let me show you what went down here. First, let me show you as Attorney General Pam Bondi arrived at the hearing. This is how she was greeted. Midas touch cameras were there. Let me show you what went down and play this clip.

1:36Let me show you Jamie Raskin's opening statement. Here is how he started. Let's play this clip. Welcome, Attorney General Bondi. You've got the best lawyer's job in America because your mission is justice and your clients are the American people. But to promote justice for the people, you've got to listen to the victims, like the women seated behind you today. Those are just some of the hundreds of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's global sex trafficking ring who are demanding that the truth be told and are demanding accountability for the abusers who trafficked and raped them. You still haven't met with these survivors.

2:17So with their permission, let me introduce to you the survivors and late survivors' family members who are present today. There's Teresa Helm. There's Jess Michaels. Laura Bloom McGee. Danny Bensky. Liz Stein. Marina Lacerda. Skye and Amanda Roberts, who are the family of the late Virginia Giuffre, Charlene Richard, and Lisa Phillips. Now, you're not showing a lot of interest in the victims, Madam Attorney General. Whether it's Epstein's human trafficking ring or the homicidal governmental violence against citizens in Minneapolis, as Attorney General, you're siding with the perpetrators and you're ignoring the victims.

3:01That will be your legacy unless you act quickly to change course. You're running a. Then Congress member Raskin talks about how Pam Bondi is running a massive Epstein cover up. Let's play it. That will be your legacy unless you act quickly to change course. You're running a massive Epstein cover up right out of the Department of Justice. You've been ordered by subpoena and by congress to turn over six million documents photographs and videos in epstein files but you've turned over only three million you say you're not turning over the other three million because they're somehow duplicative but we know that there are actual memos of victim statements in there and you also took down the department of justice's prosecution memo from 2019 so it's clearly not all duplicative, but even if it were, why not release it?

3:55Just release all the duplicative stuff. In the half you did produce, you redacted the names of abusers, enablers, accomplices, and co-conspirators, apparently to spare them embarrassment and disgrace, which is the exact opposite of what the law ordered you to do. Even worse, you shockingly failed to redact many of the victims' names, which is what you were ordered to do by Congress. Some of the victims had come forward publicly, but many had not. Many had kept their torment private, even from family and friends. But you published their names, their identities, their images on thousands of pages for the world to see.

4:42So you ignored the law. And even with over 100 ,000 employees at your disposal, you acted with some mixture of staggering incompetence, cold indifference, and jaded cruelty towards more than 1 ,000 victims raped, abused, and trafficked. This performance screams cover-up. More from Congress member Raskin right here, talking about how Pam Bondi and Trump have abandoned victims. They're going after individuals, not just when it comes to the Epstein files, but look what they're doing with Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, calling them domestic terrorists. Here, play this clip. But abandoning victims and coddling perpetrators is what you do best when the FBI opened a criminal investigation into the brutal killing in Minneapolis of Renee good, a poet and 37-year-old mother of three by Trump's masked paramilitary ICE agents, you shut it down.

5:44You claim you're investigating the cold-blooded murder of Alex Preddy, an ICU nurse at the VA. But how can we trust the administration when the president and Kristi Noem called Preddy a domestic terrorist and Stephen Miller called him a would-be assassin? Not only do you refuse to share evidence with the state and local investigators and prosecutors in Minnesota, you have blocked their access to the crime scene and the evidence. How are you seeking justice for Marimar Martinez, the Montessori school teacher in Chicago who was shot five times by a border patrol agent who bragged about it on text?

6:21Or the family of Keith Porter, a father of two, shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent in L.A.? Or the family of Silverio Villas-Gonzalez, shot and killed in Illinois minutes after he dropped his kids off at school? There's no sign of any movement at the Department of Justice. You even launched a criminal investigation into Renee Good's grieving widow. How sick is that? But it's even worse. Congress member Raskin says Trump orders up prosecutions like pizza and he sends you text messages on his truth social media platform. And then you take orders directly from him. Do you realize how unethical and how unlawful that is, Bondi?

7:03Here, play this clip.

7:33few and you snap to it. You replace real prosecutors with counterfeit stooges who robotically do the president's bidding. Nothing in American history comes close to this complete corruption of the justice function and contamination of federal law enforcement. The good news is many serious lawyers at DOJ, including some of your own original employees, have refused your lawless orders. Danielle Sassoon, the original pick for acting U.S. Attorney Manhattan, resigned rather than follow your corrupt order to quash an indictment against Mayor Eric Adams as a political favor from Donald Trump. A Federalist Society member who clerked for Justice Scalia, U.S.

8:16Attorney Sassoon refused to participate in this blatantly corrupt scheme. Her top assistant, Hagan Scotton, an Iraqi war vet and two-time Bronze Star recipient who clerked for Chief Justice Roberts and then Judge Kavanaugh promptly resigned to writing to your office quote I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool or enough of a coward to file your motion but it was never going to be me you and the president nominated Eric Siebert a 15-year career prosecutor to be your U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia But after five months of investigating Letitia James and James Comey, he found no evidence to justify criminal charges.

9:00So you forced him out. You replaced him with Lindsay Halligan, Trump's personal lawyer from the Mar-a-Lago documents case, who had zero prosecutorial experience and no qualifications. And then you were humiliated when a federal judge found that this corrupt appointment was blatantly unlawful and threw out Halligan's indictments entirely. And grand juries of American citizens have repeatedly rejected your vendettas and baseless indictments brought by the hacks left at DOJ now, with two different grand juries in Virginia voting down indictments against Letitia James in a single week. And just yesterday, another grand jury shut down your vendetta factory by rejecting indictments against the six members of Congress who had spoken out to remind all service members that they have a duty to refuse illegal orders.

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11:40grand jury in Washington, D.C., but the Trump DOJ tried to prosecute them for seditious conspiracy. Watch Jamie Raskin just lay into Pam Bondi right here. Play this clip. You tried to get a grand jury to indict six members of Congress who are veterans of our armed forces on charges of seditious conspiracy simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. I hope you will keep the wisdom and the constitutional patriotism of those grand jurors and not try it again by doubling down on that humiliation as your best lawyers. And then Jamie Raskin says to Pam Bondi, we ask you politely, but firmly answer our damn questions.

12:21When we ask you questions, don't go through that little burn book of yours and start complaining and whining and attacking. Just answer the damn questions. Do you understand Ben Bondi here play this clip. Now, as ranking ranking member, I asked the chairman to add a few extra rounds of questions today because we each have five hours of questions, not five minutes. But we're stuck with five minutes. That's clearly insufficient to give voice to America's victims and survivors and to demand answers about all the corruption and cover ups that we see at DOJ right now. We've got just one round. So we ask you politely but firmly, Madam Attorney General, please do not waste one second of our precious time by evading questions, by changing the subject or engaging in personal attacks against members of Congress.

13:16We saw your performance in the Senate and we're not going to accept that. This isn't a game. In the Senate, you brought something with you called a burn book, a binder of smears to attack members personally for doing the people's work of oversight. Please set the burn book aside and answer our questions. And when you hear us reclaim our time, that means it's time for you to stop speaking. We only have five minutes, so when we reclaim our time, that means you stop. And if you don't, we will ask the chair to stop the clock and let you go on his time. The quality of justice in America depends on the character of our government.

13:52Please do your job and bring the Department of Justice back from the brink. The survivors seated behind you and the American people watching everywhere deserve a Department of Justice worthy of its name. I yield back, Mr. Chairman. Now, a particularly powerful moment at the outset of this hearing is when Congresswoman Jayapal, you've seen her on the Midas Touch Network before, she calls for the victims who are in attendance at the hearing today, the survivors who are at the hearing today to stand up. And she says to the survivors in the room, stand up right now and raise your hand if you've never met Pam Bondi or if you've never had the opportunity to even meet with the DOJ.

14:33And the DOJ's first and foremost priority is supposed to be to protect survivors, to protect victims. That's what the DOJ has a whole department dedicated. That's what they're doing. They're supposed to prosecute the bad guys and they're supposed to help victims and survivors. Watch what went down here. Play this clip. To the survivors in the room. If you are willing, please stand.

15:04And if you are willing, please raise your hands if you have still not been able to meet with this Department of Justice. Please know for the record that every single survivor has raised their hand. And then I'll just share with you what Pam Bondi had to say. More whining right away in her opening statement, where she's like, we had to fight all of this judicial activism. It was a coordinated effort by all of these judges and all of the judges. They don't like Donald Trump. More whining. Exactly what we expect from Pam Bondi. Play this clip. This administration has been sued 627 times. We fought through a nonstop flood of bad faith, temporary restraining orders from liberal activist judges across this country.

15:56America has never seen this level of coordinated judicial opposition towards a presidential administration. It is not only an unlawful attack on the executive branch's authority, but a serious attack on the democratic process. In spite of this unprecedented judicial activism, we've attained 24 favorable rulings at the U.S. Supreme Court, their emergency docket and even more to come. We've done so while ending the weaponization of the prior administration by dropping FASAC prosecutions, exposing the Arctic Frost scandal via congressional disclosure. Thank you, chairman, and restoring one tier of justice in this country.

16:49And then she has the audacity to say she wants to acknowledge the Epstein survivors when you just saw them stand up and you refuse to acknowledge them ever. Do you realize how obviously phony you are? What a fraud you are? What a crook you are? Here, play this clip.

17:30fighting for victims, and I will continue to do so. I am deeply sorry for what any victim, any victim has been through, especially as a result of that monster. If you have any information to share with law enforcement about anyone who has hurt you or abused you, the FBI is waiting to hear from you. I want you to know that any accusations of criminal wrongdoing will be taken seriously and investigated. The Department of Justice is committed to holding criminals accountable to the fullest extent of the law. And then right before that hearing, we heard from some of those survivors right here, an Epstein survivor over here saying how deeply disappointed she is in Bondi play this clip.

18:27To Ms. Bondi, we are deeply disappointed by the way you and your leadership in this department have treated survivors. And today, while you're being questioned, we ask you to look in the eyes of every single one of us and remember Virginia Roberts Jouffre, who paid the ultimate sacrifice for the trauma that she had endured. We ask you to remember the lives that we have lost during this process. Accountability means real answers, not evasion. It means transparency, not more hiding. Another survivor saying that all we hear is from the Trump regime saying they want to move on. Let's just move on.

19:09And the survivors can't move on. Here, play this clip. We as a nation have an opportunity to send a strong message that we will not protect people who victimize children. That we will stand up for what is right despite what our politics are. That we will cross the aisle and that we will stand behind survivors for justice. We keep hearing our press secretary and our department of justice and other government officials saying they're moving on from this. I wish that we could. I met Epstein and Maxwell when I was 21 years old. I'm nearly 53 now. We cannot move on as survivors of this crime and as citizens of this nation without changing this narrative.

20:02So I ask you all to stand behind us and demand accountability for our government because we certainly are going to. And then here's another Epstein survivor talking about how the Trump regime botched the redactions of survivors names so badly, they could only infer that it's malicious, that it was an attempt to intimidate and harm the survivors. Here, play this clip. Last year, I stood here as a survivor demanding the release of the Epstein files. Today, I stand here again as a citizen demanding accountability now that Congress is questioning Pam Bondi of the Department of Justice about the handling of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

20:53Let me be clear. Survivors are furious. We watched the Justice Department botched redactions so badly that victims' images were exposed while predators' identities were kept hidden and protected. That does not feel like an accident or a clerical error. It feels like betrayal. We're going to keep you updated throughout the day on this hearing. That's what we got you for now. We'll bring you more soon. Thanks for watching. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. Hit subscribe.

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