00:00President Trump dug in on his threat to send National Guard troops to other Democratic-run
00:05cities as part of his federal crackdown on crime. Specifically, he's singling out Chicago
00:10and Baltimore. Let's listen. I'm willing to go to Chicago, which is a big trouble,
00:17but we have a governor that refuses to admit his problems, huge problems.
00:24Baltimore, Westmore, was telling me he wants, I want to walk with the president. Well, I said,
00:28I want to walk with you, too, someday. But first, you've got to clean up your crime,
00:33because I'm not walking in Baltimore right now. Baltimore is a hellhole.
00:39With us now is Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He is the top Democrat
00:44on the House Judiciary Committee. So thank you so much for being with us. You told my colleague,
00:50Pamela Brown, yesterday that you thought this military invasion, as you called it,
00:54is backfiring on Trump. How so? Because he certainly does not think it is backfiring.
01:00He clearly thinks it's working for him. Well, it cuts against the deepest principles
01:04of the country. I mean, we were founded in opposition to a standing army with a fear of
01:10a standing army. And the military is not supposed to be used for ordinary law enforcement purposes.
01:16In D.C., he was talking about cleaning up the graffiti and, you know, dealing with the blight
01:22of homelessness, which are obviously local, not federal issues. And he's trying to militarize
01:31our society, intimidate its political opponents. The whole idea of picking cities based on their
01:37partisan leadership is absurd. I mean, there are lots of Republican cities in town struggling
01:43with crime. Everybody is across the country, always. Crime has always been part of our history.
01:50And yet crime is down. In D.C., for example, it's at a 30-year low. It's down in Baltimore. It's down
01:58in Chicago. But the point is that in our system of federalism, the different branches of government
02:03and the different departments of government are supposed to work together. If Donald Trump thinks
02:07he's got some great ideas for Chicago or Miami or Houston, Texas or whatever, he should call a
02:14summit for the White House and say, hey, here's some ideas where the feds can work together with
02:18states and localities, not have a series of rolling National Guard invasions of people's cities.
02:24And a lot of what you said may be true. And certainly there was a lot of suspicion of a standing army
02:30when the country was founded. That is a tradition in America. But at the same time, our White House
02:36reporter, Elena Treen, is reporting that Trump is looking at what's happening in D.C., for instance,
02:40especially now that the guard is armed. They're walking around with their weapons. And he's
02:46reveling in these pictures. Again, he does not see this as backfiring. He is reveling in these
02:53images. Well, you can look at his poll numbers, I suppose, if you want some vaguely objective
02:57measure of it. And clearly he's way underwater. But what I'm seeing is that the people who live in
03:04these states, who live in these communities, are deeply offended by it. I mean, is Donald Trump really
03:09more interested in public safety in Chicago or Washington than the people who live in those
03:14cities? It's hard to believe. I mean, that cuts against the whole idea of local government.
03:18The reason that we elect mayors and city councils is so they can embody the priorities of the people.
03:24Now, in D.C., he took away a billion dollars in locally raised revenue that the people in D.C.
03:31had set aside to do crime fighting and criminal justice and public education. They want their money
03:36back. People in Chicago, they've got their own ideas about what should happen. Like the
03:41mayor and the governor said yesterday, we've got a problem with guns here. Why don't we have a
03:48universal violent criminal background check, which more than 90 percent of the American people support?
03:53If you want to get together on a national agenda on crime fighting, let's do it, right? We have
03:58the Brady Gun Safety Act, and it's working, but there's loopholes in it. People are still able to get
04:03guns on the Internet or to gun show, you know, extravaganza. There are different ways people
04:09are getting it. We should have a violent felon criminal background check for everybody who's
04:14purchasing a gun. That's something the feds could actually do in cooperation with the states and
04:19local governments to make America safer. But that would require cooperation and not the series of,
04:25you know, staged theatrical confrontations that Donald Trump is looking for.
04:29Purportedly, the objective is about crime. What do you think his objective is in doing this?
04:33Well, one thing he's clearly doing is changing the subject from a different form of crime, which is
04:41child sex trafficking, which Jeffrey Epstein was a mastermind of, that Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted
04:48of and sentenced to jail for 20 years of. And Donald Trump's name apparently appears throughout
04:53the Epstein file. He had run on a platform promising to release the Epstein files. Then he had 1,000 FBI
05:01agents searching through the files, pouring over them to look for his name, to look for photographs,
05:06to look for video glimpses of him. And then when they came back and reported him, he said,
05:11we're not releasing this. And we have a strong bipartisan majority in Congress demanding the release
05:16of the Epstein files. So this is a convenient and irrelevant distraction from that for him. But I think, look,
05:24there are significant levels of criminality taking place within his own administration, right?
05:32There's a lot of corruption taking place. So all of this is a distraction.
05:35But Americans also, they do have concerns about crime, even if you look at statistics showing that it's going down.
05:41Nobody more than the mayors and the council people and the police. Certainly no doubt. And people who
05:45live in these communities. But he sees opportunity. So how do Democrats counter that? And why have they
05:54not been able to effectively counter that? Even as statistics have gone down, you're seeing people
05:59actually worried even more about crime in their communities. Well, look, I mean, if you're the victim
06:04of a crime, you don't care what the general rates are. I mean, crime could be falling, but if,
06:09you know, your car is carjacked, if your house is robbed, if you're the victim of a scam,
06:16then you feel it just as much as if crime were going up, right? It's the same thing from your
06:22perspective. So let's have a national crime summit with the mayors, with the governors. Let's get
06:28everybody in Congress on both sides of the aisle to come together to deal with it. I'm part of a
06:32bipartisan anti-scam task force because a lot of my constituents have been scammed by these ripoff
06:38artists. And yet the Trump administration has been dismantling a lot of the infrastructure that
06:44we use to deal with it, just like they've been dismantling the infrastructure that fights human
06:49trafficking. They've cut funds from the Department of State, from the Department of Justice. And I
06:53think, you know, the people out in Chicago were raising this just yesterday. They cut hundreds of
06:59millions of dollars from local police departments and victim assistance organizations and crime-fighting
07:05civil society groups because one doge guy just said we should cut these hundreds of millions
07:11of dollars in grants. That was money that was approved by the House, by the Senate, signed into
07:15law by the president, and doge cut it. And we want those hundreds of millions of dollars restored,
07:20just like I know the people in D.C. They want their billion dollars restored. That's locally raised
07:25revenue that was taken away from them. So there's a lot we can do if we're going to be serious about
07:29it. And it's not just a, you know, a bunch of photo ops. Congressman Jamie Raskin, thank you so much for
07:34being with us. You bet. Really appreciate it.
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