Congressman Jamie Raskin has led the fight to defend the country against Trump’s authoritarianism since 2017. He notably served on the 2021 January 6th Committee and helped to expose and document the seemingly endless list of crimes and schemes that Trump and his allies carried out on American people.
Today, Rep. Raskin is still fighting, as he has just introduced legislation to kill Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s ‘super pardon’ for Trump, his family and their businesses.
On this episode of The Siren Podcast, Jo sits down with Rep. Raskin to discuss one of the most brazen corruption schemes of the Trump era: his $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" fund designed exclusively to reward January 6th insurrectionists and election deniers with cash prizes.
Rep. Raskin breaks down how the fund came to be, which was rooted in a lawsuit Trump filed against the government over the release of his tax returns. The payouts have already started, with Trump ally and former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn receiving $1.25 million and Trump sycophant Carter Page receiving the same amount. Even Jan. 6 rioter Ashley Babbitt’s family, received $5 million, after two federal investigations showed that police had acted responsibly during her case.
Meanwhile, the officers who were beaten, hospitalized, and forced out of their careers defending the Capitol on January 6th have received nothing except death threats from Donald Trump’s rabid supporters.
Jo and Rep. Raskin also get into the constitutional problems with the fund — of which there are more than a dozen. Notably, the 14th Amendment, passed after the Civil War, explicitly bars the government from compensating insurrectionists. The domestic emoluments clause prohibits the president from receiving additional payments from the federal government. And under the Constitution, it’s Congress (not the executive branch or Donald Trump) that appropriates money. And unsurprisingly, none of that stopped the Trump regime from moving forward anyway.
Finally, Rep. Raskin walks through the legislation he’s introduced to shut this whole blatantly illegal scheme down, by blocking any payments to January 6th participants, forbidding the settlement of claims made by the president or his family, and closing the door on the blanket immunity the DOJ quietly tucked into the agreement.
This is an episode you definitely won’t want to miss. All this and more, right here on The Siren Network.
