Why the Trump administration is not a reliable ally to Britain

0:02Jon Sopel:This is a Global Player original podcast. Is America still a reliable ally to us? I think the American people are. Yeah. This administration? No, I think we have a problem with this administration. I think that they are really caught up with the autocrats and the dictators and the bullies of the world. That is Jamie Raskin, one of the most senior Democrats in the Congress, who is in London at Chatham House and he is unsparing in his criticism of Donald Trump and the threat he poses to democracy. We have an exclusive interview with him while he's in the UK. Welcome to the News Agents USA.

0:48It's John.

0:50Jon Sopel:Now, Jamie Raskin is one of the foremost Democrat lawmakers. He led the prosecution, the impeachment, if you like, of Donald Trump after the events of January the 6th, a position that was appointed to him by Nancy Pelosi. And it earned a permanent enmity with Donald Trump. Trump recently called Raskin ugly and a dope and a loser in block capitals, to which Raskin replied, I suppose I don't like being called ugly by Donald Trump, but not everyone can live up to his exquisite levels of handsomeness and personal physical grace. Ruskin also didn't endear himself that much to Joe Biden when he became one of the first democratic lawmakers to write to him and say, maybe it was time to get out of the presidential race.

1:38Jon Sopel:He's the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee and represents Maryland's 8th congressional district and is in London looking at the crisis in free speech. Congressman Raskin, thank you very much for being with us and welcome to the newsagents. Let me start with that crisis in free speech because I've just heard the speech you've delivered where you lacerated the Vice President J.D. Vance for the things he said that the real crisis in free speech was not Russia or China, it was Europe. Is America still a reliable ally to us? I think the American people are, yeah. This administration? No, I think we have a problem with this administration.

2:21I think that they are really caught up with the autocrats and the dictators and the bullies of the world. And that's why I wanted, on this trip, where we're supposed to be investigating the European Union's attack on the free speech rights of the right wing in Europe, I wanted to turn the tables and say, in fact, it's Donald Trump who's attacking with state power, free speech rights in America of law firms and universities and protesters and you name it. And in fact, the American people are on the side of free speech and are on the side of democracy. And I want to keep our true democratic alliance alive.

3:02Jon Sopel:In answer to the question, is America a reliable ally with Donald Trump at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? The answer is no. With Donald Trump, you can't rely on anything. I mean, one day your tariffs are going to be 40 percent, then they're going to be 30 percent, and there's going to be no tariffs, and there's going to be 15 percent. I mean, even his one major ideological commitment, which is to mass deportation of people who are undocumented in the country, A couple of weeks ago, he said, well, that's not really going to apply to people on the farms because we need them. And they're such good workers and people in restaurants.

3:34Then he backed off on that when one of his aides got to him on it. And so, yeah, there's no enduring policy commitments there. It's a it's chaotic. So, yes, it's not reliable. Nobody can really rely on it. But what I want to tell you is you can rely on the people of America. We're going to get back on track in terms of our commitment to freedom and democracy and social progress and our transatlantic relationships. But Congressman, we heard that four years ago from Joe Biden.

4:03Jon Sopel:We heard that from Joe Biden when he came to Cornwall at the G7 summit and said, America is back. Don't worry. That was an aberration what happened. Yeah. I mean, maybe Joe Biden was the aberration. And what Trump represents is the new normal where he's still popular. He won a presidential election last November. The Democrats seem to be nowhere. Well You know, I I don't I don't have a crystal ball. I'm not clairvoyant I don't know but I will tell you that there are a lot of us in America who are determined to see that our country remain a true Democratic force in the world for freedom for human rights for free markets among the people of the world and And we don't like what Donald Trump has stood for.

4:50And we don't think it's going to last. I mean, his popularity has been sagging over the trade war he's announced against the whole world, over this Doge experiment. Even Elon Musk has run out of town and is no longer part of it. It's tremendously unpopular. And even all of the mass deportations and the raids that they're doing have become unpopular in Trump country, in red states, where it's really dislocating people's way of life.

5:17Jon Sopel:And yet the one issue, and you've just listed a list of things where you think he's doing badly, the one issue where arguably Donald Trump is having real problems is Jeffrey Epstein. Yes. A guy who died, you know, six, seven years ago. Yes. Is it serious, the situation? Well, look, you know, in the new age of social media that we inhabit, and of course, the social media are more important to how people get news, certainly younger people than the traditional media. What matters is what people are able to communicate on the internet. And what he's been able to communicate is that he wanted the Jeffrey Epstein files to be released.

5:57And he knew Jeffrey Epstein. That was his best friend for more than a decade. And so people trusted him that he knew what he was talking about when he said there was an entire universe, people of wealth and power who were part of this child sex ring. So people believed him. Then he got into office. They got to see the files. He had more than a thousand FBI agents working around the clock, 24 hour shifts. FBI was going, looking for any mentions of Donald Trump, any pictures of Donald Trump, any video of Donald Trump. And after that happened, he said they were not going to be releasing the Epstein files.

6:34So who's upset about that? Well, obviously the Democrats, because the Democrats are saying, wait a second, you've been running against the Democrats saying that there's a huge child sex conspiracy and feeding that to people. Go ahead and release it. But also the Republicans, because the Republicans got aboard that bandwagon and said, we're going to release the Epstein tapes. And now suddenly he won't do it. So, I mean, you're right that there are other policy issues that might have come first. For example, the fact that he's thrown 17 million people off of their Medicaid health coverage. That's what we've been fighting over for the last several months, but they did it.

7:13That did not cause the kind of explosion on the Republican side that the Epstein files has.

7:18Jon Sopel:Surely if there was stuff, and I saw the speech you made on the floor of the House the other week saying you've got to release all the files and what are the Republicans doing trying to cover this up? If there was anything that was compromising of Donald Trump in those files, and let's face it, the files were compiled during the Biden years, surely they would have come out by now. Why do you assume that? Well, because presumably there would have been ways and means of people in the Biden administration, in the Justice Department, of leaking information that would have been damaging to Donald Trump when you're facing him in the presidential election.

7:54I mean, I want to make two points about that. Number one is Donald Trump has taken the Department of Justice in a radically different direction from what it has been throughout its entire history, going back to the 19th century. It really has been an independent law enforcement branch, where there's been a wall of separation between politics and prosecutorial decisions. Trump is the one who has said, I'm going to take this over. It's his attorney general who has said, we are going to report to Donald Trump, and they're running it like his personal law firm. So when people say, why didn't Biden just release it?

8:27Biden didn't run the Department of Justice. There was an attorney general there. If you want to ask the question, why did an attorney general Merrick Garland do it? There are a lot of Democrats asking the question, why didn't Merrick Garland bring various prosecutions earlier in the administration than he did? In any event, you'd have to ask him to know why. But it was nobody was making a big deal out of it except Donald Trump. And that was later. Remember that it was under the Biden administration that Ghislaine Maxwell was being prosecuted. prosecuted. So there was action happening there. She was prosecuted and convicted and sent to jail for 20 years.

9:02Jon Sopel:Look, we are sitting here in London. I've tried to imagine the circumstances where our equivalent of the deputy attorney general, the justice secretary or the minister of state for justice, would go to a prison to speak to someone who has been convicted for 20 years. And I'm finding it, I struggle to imagine it. What is going on there? It's utterly baffling. She is going to come to congress to testify if she testifies and there's a strong demand to see her come and testify Her credibility is quite near zero because she's seeking a pardon and clemency from President Trump That's her only practical way of getting out of prison.

9:46And so Her testimony is likely to be written in all caps and bold letters with lots of exclamation points because Donald Trump will presumably get her to say whatever he wants. Now, the idea that the Department of Justice would lend itself to this scheme just demonstrates how much they are operating under Donald Trump's thumb. It is a completely baffling and bizarre thing. What exactly is he there to discuss? Well, presumably he's there to discuss what would the content of her testimony be and how pleasing would that be to the president who controls the power to pardon her? And he's already proven multiple times, literally thousands of times almost, that he's willing to use the pardon power to reward his political friends or those who do as well.

10:31So let's just say you're right.

10:33Jon Sopel:Let's say the theory is that Ghislaine Maxwell says, yeah, Donald Trump never came to the island, but there were a whole pile of Democratic senators and prominent Democrats who did. Donald Trump is squeaky clean. There's nothing to see here. Yeah. How easy is that to sell, given that you are going to then release the only person who was convicted of the monstrous activities? QAnon has fantasized about this pedophile ring. There was a pedophile ring at that island of Jeffrey Epps. Well, Donald Trump just released from prison 1 ,600 people who participated in an insurrectionary riot against our government, including those who violently assaulted more than 140 of our police officers, disabling many of them, disfiguring many of them.

11:16And he had no problem pardoning them because they had been playing on his team. And he basically pardoned a future private militia for whatever he wants to do. So do I think he would have any compunction about pardoning Maxwell if she were to get up and say, well, the one person who tried to get Jeffrey Epstein to stop all of this child sexual abuse was Donald Trump who really urged him not to do it. He didn't call the police. It's true. He didn't report it to the authorities, but he really told him it was a bad idea. Maybe she comes forward to say that. Does anybody think it's worth anything?

11:46No. So in Congress, the Department of Justice should release the files and then we can take her testimony into account with everything else we're able to get and whatever other witnesses come forward. Do you think they will? I think they're going to have to because there are lots of Republicans who are honest people who think that Donald Trump really meant it when he said he was going to release the files and that there was this extraordinary conspiracy of silence to suppress the truth about the full dimensions of this child sex abuse ring. Remember there was a guy who showed up at a restaurant in Washington DC, Comet Pizza, I think with an AR-15, certainly some kind of rifle.

12:27Jon Sopel:On Connecticut Avenue. Yeah, I remember it Avenue because he believed all of this stuff So there are not thousands or hundreds of thousands but millions of people who believed Donald Trump when he said it And they are getting very angry about the fact that Donald Trump has changed his tune because his name now appears throughout the Epstein files. So Is this going to be like Al Capone where it's not the crimes. It's the tax thing that gets him I mean, is it going to be something like Epstein where he the breach happens with his base, which has seemed so solid until now? Well, first of all, Donald Trump has been impeached twice, once for the Ukraine shakedown, once for inciting.

13:08And the American people took a view on that and said we still want him as our president. That's true. He's also been held accountable in civil court in New York, where a unanimous jury found him guilty on civil grounds of sexual abuse. So there have been certain kinds of accountability that begin to give people a better sense of who this guy is. You may be right that maybe it comes down to this. I don't want to discount the significance of what the Epstein files show. There were real and are real victims of what Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell did. And the girls who were as young as 14 years old are now women who've come forward to talk about the horrors inflicted on them, their families, in their lives by what they did.

13:54And on the Democratic side, anyway, we view institutionalized child sex abuse and the abuse of power and connections as a serious crisis in our society. It's not just Epstein. I mean, we had the whole crisis with massive child sex abuse in the Catholic Church. We've seen scandals at universities like Michigan State and Ohio State, rapes and sexual assaults, not just against girls, but boys, young men, as well as young women. This is something that we've got to deal with. But meantime, the Trump administration is deleting funding for all the anti-human trafficking efforts that we've got going across the U.S.

14:33government. The State Department, the Department of Justice, Health and Human Services, they're just shutting the anti-human trafficking programs down. So there's a broader significance to the discussion over the Epstein files.

14:45Jon Sopel:you're here in london you're talking about the crisis in free speech you're also talking about the relationship in your speech this evening was talking about the importance of the relationship between europe and the u.s and that they need to stand together over the issue of palestine and what happens in gaza it looks like the u.s is going in one direction and europe is going in another congressman what do you make of the situation the pictures of starving children in Gaza? And what should be the policy in terms of recognizing Palestine? Well, it's absolutely gruesome and grim and unacceptable.

15:21And there are children starving, there are adults who are being shot down while they're waiting to go and get food. And that is the immediate emergency, which I think is unifying the world in demanding immediate shipments of food aid and medical assistance into Gaza. But it is opening up this broader conversation about where this war is going, because it seems to have long since been clear that Israel's efforts under Benjamin Netanyahu are not to get the hostages out. And certainly the hostage families do not feel that that is the paramount goal in any way. But instead, you have Smotrich and Ben Kavir, who've been exercising a lot of decisive influence over where that's going.

16:08So, look, the first thing is people are starving right now. People are in danger right now. And the world has got to unify to de-escalate the situation and get food aid in. And then let us hope that that leads very quickly to a ceasefire where we can address what the future is going to be so that the Israel can live in security. The Palestinians can live in security. We can remove terrorist operators in Hamas, the ones that are left, and that there is a future of decency and prosperity and human rights and democracy for Israelis and Palestinians alike.

16:45Jon Sopel:But you'll know that President Macron has said that at the UN General Assembly in September, France is going to recognize Palestine as a country. The British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, has said something very similar, although with a couple of conditions attached to it, that he too. Do you think America should recognize Palestine? Well, you know, we know that's not going to happen under President Trump. And I read what President Macron is doing and what Starmer is doing is saying this status quo cannot last where 35 or 40 or 50 people are dying every day, including lots of children. The world will not abide that.

17:21That situation has got to change. And so if that's the shock that's needed, they are saying that is the shock that is needed, that they are willing to just go ahead and recognize a Palestinian state if nothing else is going to change in the meantime. So their rights do it. Well, look, the world needs to respond to this situation. That's not the only way to respond. I mean, those of us in Congress are demanding that there be immediate food shipment and opening of the borders so food can get in to save people. So I understand everybody is rightfully frustrated with the situation and people are speaking out about it.

18:01And that to me is a sign of life of a global alliance for democracy and human rights. And we should be able to come through this crisis with Israel having strategic security at its borders, which is inviolable. The hostages that are left have got to be released by Hamas. Hamas should be sidelined and discarded as a force with the Palestinians. But there's got to be movement forward to create a two-state solution. Or if the parties over there have another idea, they can put it on the table. That's why, you know, I don't know that we need to prejudge what the outcome is going to be. But the status quo is completely intolerable.

18:43Jon Sopel:I mean, let's go back to where we started. You talked about the threat to democracy of Donald Trump and amassing power and all the rest of it. Do you think that Benjamin Netanyahu and Smotrich and Ben-Gavir are threats to Israeli democracy in the way that they are going about this? Look, I think that the right-wing autocrats of the world are a terrible threat to their own societies, whether you're talking about Putin in Russia or Orban in Hungary or Xi in China or Netanyahu, Smotrich, Ben-Gavir in Israel. I mean, you can take the countries around the world. Bolsonaro has been a major threat in Brazil.

19:18And this is going on all over the place. And one of the things that I'm here to talk about is that the autocrats, the dictators and the bullies have found each other. They have a common enemy in strong liberal democracy. They're not interested in either global movements or domestic commitments to human rights for people. We have got to place human rights first. And human rights and democracy go together. The dictators and the kings and the queens and the emperors are never going to defend people's human rights. All that they care about is their own power and their own wealth. And like in our country, in America, America's a great country.

19:56You can get rich in a lot of different ways. You should not be able to get rich by going into government and making deals with foreign dictators or collecting$400 million airplanes from autocratic governments around the world. And that should not be your agenda. Your agenda should be the common good of the American people. And so that's what we mean by democratic government, government that's an instrument for uplifting everybody in society.

20:21Jon Sopel:And one of the longstanding policies of the United States has been a two-state solution, which everyone signs up to, or a lot of people sign up to, Benjamin Netanyahu, who notably doesn't. But isn't that as an idea dead? I mean, realistically, Israel after October the 7th, the Israeli people will not feel comfortable. Netanyahu knows that, is capitalizing on that. I mean, do you still think that it is possible to reinvigorate the idea of it? Well, I mean, the nightmare terrorism of October 7th, which will live forever in infamy in the eyes of the world, took place without a two-state solution.

20:59You could view it as an episode in terrorism that took place where there wasn't a secure Palestinian state that could control terrorists and that could engage in diplomacy and mutual security pacts with the people of Israel and so on. And, you know, there's been a lot of reportage in Israel about regret over Netanyahu's willingness to support Hamas through Qatar, through payments that were made to Qatar, precisely because Hamas and the Palestinian Authority would not get together. It was sort of a poor form of the divide and conquer strategy. So in any event, I understand that that is the popular sentiment there.

21:46It's been American foreign policy for decades that were committed to a two-state solution. Obviously, a lot of things complicate that up until this point. There's a lot of different solutions that people from right to left are putting on the table now about how to get out of it. But right now we're facing a short-term crisis and emergency with children dying every single day and famine spreading throughout Gaza. That's just an unacceptable situation. And the great powers of the world and the great diplomats of the world need to get together to get through this crisis.

22:20Jon Sopel:You are a prominent Jewish congressman. You are a supporter of Israel, although a critical friend, if I could put it like that. How does Israel come back from this in the reputation of this country which was once seen as an I you know Kind of this lively vibrant democracy which was outward looking and all the rest of it It's seen as a pariah state now, isn't it? Well look there's a struggle for Democracy and human rights and there's a struggle for civilization in every single society on earth And I would like to think just speaking about my own country about America that we are defined not by the problems that we've had or the injustices that we've institutionalized, like slavery, which was in existence for, well, centuries, if you include the time before we became a country, but it was in existence for a long time.

23:12I would like to think we are defined not by slavery or the dispossession of the Native American Indians. We've been defined by the actions we've taken against it, abolition, the civil war, the people who put themselves on the line to end slavery, to build reconstruction, to fight for the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But the way we do justice to those civilizing movements that have come before us is to try to keep making those ideals real at a time when there's constant democratic backsliding. So I would say the people of Israel have so much to be proud for and proud of in terms of what they've created in their society and the progress that they've made.