Ranking Member Raskin remarks: After Jan 6: Setting the Record Straight on the Capitol Insurrection

Thank you kindly, Chairman Thompson. Welcome to all of our witnesses. Welcome to all of the members who've joined us. William Faulner once said, "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past." But Speaker Johnson would love to kill the past. Indeed, the very recent past. Republicans today are observing this solemn anniversary by doing exactly nothing. They've even refused to hang up the plaque, which a bipartisan congressional majority voted to put up to honor the officers who defended the capital. Um, and the peaceful transfer of power and the vice president on J6. So, it's been 5 years since January 6. It's been three years since that plaque was supposed to be uh put up, but they still haven't put it up. took them 24 hours to put up a new plaque allegedly changing the name of the Kennedy Center to the Trump Kennedy Center. 24 hours and that was illegal. That's like graffiti that was put up uh on the Kennedy Center building. Uh they have a legal requirement to put it up and I call on Speaker Johnson to put it up today. It's gathering dust in a closet somewhere. Thank you, Leader Jeff. Thank you, Chairman Thompson, for not surrendering to the Orwellian project of forgetting, but rather insisting that we remember long after we are all gone. Um, future generations will speak the names of Hajes and Dun, Ganel and Fenon, Siknic and Pingen. They will be remembered as the great patriots that they are. And the people who smashed them in the face with Confederate battle flags and Trump flags, the people who tried to destroy our constitutional order, will be remembered as fascist traitors to their own country. So we must remember three rings of sedition that took place on J6. the realm of the coup, the realm of the insurrection, and the realm of the mob violence. The coup was anchored in months of the big lie. Trump claimed to have won an election. He lost by more than 7 million votes, 306 to 232 in electoral college. Um he he needed to get MAGA followers to simply disregard reality and facts and dismiss more than 60 federal and state court decisions that had rejected every claim of electoral fraud and corruption that they advanced in courtrooms across the land. This was critical because the president understood that lies would be the fuel for violence. As Voltater said, "Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." Well, the coup depended also on coercive pressure campaigns trying to force state election officials to just find me 11,780 votes. Coercive pressure campaigns to get DOJ to endorse the false claims. just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressman. The recruitment of counterfeit electors. The plot to bully Pence into rejecting electoral college votes from swing states and either just declare Trump president or kick the whole thing into a contingent election in the House. So that was the the coup part of the operation. The second layer out the realm of the insurrection was the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers, the 3enters, the muscle. And these were the white supremacist violent groups, white Christian nationalist groups that had trained for weeks or months to get ready, staging confrontations at state capitals as dress rehearsals for what was to happen. The Proud Boys came to DC twice in the leadup to J6 and provoked brawls with anyone that they would describe as Antifa. They organized in military fashion and they were dead set on attacking the police, storming the capital, and stopping the steel. So as ferocious and violent as the organized insurrectionists of maybe six or 700 were, they could not [clears throat] have succeeded without that third tier of sedition, the mob itself, the mob riot. After Trump convinced the organizers to change the date of their rally from January 20th, inauguration day, to January 6th, the electoral count day. He then went on social media to recruit tens of thousands of mob extras to back up the Proud Boys and the Oathkeepers who would get the fight against the police started. And you know, Trump kicked it off with the famous tweet saying, "Be there. We'll be wild." Which set the MAGA Twitter verse on fire. Well, um, it all culminated, of course, with his speech on the lips where he said, "You got to go and fight and fight like hell, and if you don't, you won't have a country anymore." So, the attempted coup, the insurrection, the mob violence converged and exploded on J6. Today we analyze the shocking uh resurgence of political violence in this century, its relationship to propaganda, misinformation and disinformation, and the threat that it poses to American constitutional government. We honor the heroes who helped us to defeat this attack on our democracy. We also recognize today that the political violence unleashed by Trump did not end on J6. On his first day back in office last year, he pardoned nearly 1,600 of the riers and insurrectionists, including hundreds who violated police officers, including several in this room. Those pardons were Ross boils shared indiscriminately without regard to their actual offenses, their criminal sentences, their prior records, their contrition, their repentance, or their reform and rehabilitation. They were essentially a payoff to Trump's private militia, which is now ready to stand back and stand by again for future engagements. We could play this video. >> I believe that by Donald Trump pardon me, he going to be pardoning good men. as one of Donald Trump's first acts back in office. >> Approximately 1,500 for a pardon, full pardon. >> He pardoned criminals who attacked the capital on January 6th. >> So this is January 6th and these are the hostages. >> Convicts who beat and battered police [music] officers see the [ __ ] war. >> Full pardon. >> They crossed their eyes. These are the criminals he released back into our communities. >> Home invaders, burglars, sex offenders, [music] people who continued plotting violence against their political opponents set free by [music] Donald Trump to terrorize their neighbors. >> We hope they come out tonight. Frankly, [music] >> they pose a serious threat to public safety. As we show in a report released by House Judiciary Dems this week, at least 33 pardon insurrectionists have since committed additional crimes since January 6th, including child sexual assault, terroristic threats, domestic violence, and conspiracy to murder FBI agents. and yet pardon in uh Trump indiscriminately pardoned all of them. When you reward and normalize criminal behavior, of course, you invite more of it. And the president didn't just free his riers for doing his dirty work. He punished law enforcement for doing their jobs, purging hundreds of career FBI agents and prosecutors just because they worked on J6. He installed actual participants in the attack in the Department of Justice itself. The new US pardon attorney, Ed Martin, tweeted from the Capitol grounds on this day five years ago and described the mayhem as Marty Gro in DC. His senior counselor at the Department of Justice, Jared Weise, is another J6 defendant captured on body camera footage yelling, "Kill him! Kill him!" five different times as police were being attacked right next to him. These leaders at the Department of Justice today have never once regretted their participation in this nightmare. With election deniers and J6 conspiracists Pam Bondi and Cash Patel at the top of the DOJ, it's like the Joker and the Riddler and the Penguin have taken over Gotham City. So I close with the thought that it is still January 6th in America and it will be until the forces of strong nonviolent democracy prevail. We are still in the fight of our lives my friends. And now I want to introduce our witnesses for the first panel. First we have officer Winston um Pingen who is a former Capitol police officer who defended the capital and all of us on J6 2021. He was stationed on the west front, the scene of the most brutal violence that day. He was punched in the face, knocked on his back, and had his baton ripped from his hands by riers. The men who attacked him have been pardoned and celebrated as heroes. Next, we have Brendan Belaloo, a former federal prosecutor at the US Attorney's Office in Washington DC, who spent two years prosecuting J6 riers and resigned three days after Trump pardoned them. Mr. Blue has described Trump's pardons as part of an authoritarian playbook. Next, we have Mary McCord, the executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law School, who spent nearly 20 years as a federal prosecutor and rose to become an acting assistant AG for National Security. She was among the first to sound the alarm in 2020 that Trump's lies were whipping his dieard MAGA supporters into a frenzy. Her warnings were precient. Finally, we have Pamela Hempill, who has traveled to us from Idaho. She is uh a 72year-old Idaho woman, formerly known as the MAGA granny, who unlike nearly all the other 1600 J6 defendants, formerly rejected President Trump's pardon. Miss Hemp was once a true believer who pushed past police lines because she believed in Trump's lies. She pleaded guilty and served her time and has steadfastly pushed back against attempts by Donald Trump and his allies to rewrite and whitewash the history of what happened on January 6. I'm so eager to hear from all four of our witnesses and I'm uh thrilled that you decided to join us today. Thank you for being here and uh we Mr. Ping, we can go ahead and start with