00:00The president clearly wants to determine the results of this election by engaging in anything
00:07other than just persuasion that he's got a program and he's got policies that will benefit the
00:13American people. So they're trying mid-decade gerrymandering, extreme gerrymandering. Even that
00:18seems to be boomeranging against them in Texas. Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman. Welcome to all
00:24of our witnesses today. I'm still waiting for my $5,000 doge check, Ms. Crockett, and
00:32the $2,000 tariff check. So I'm not sure they're going to be able to- Respectfully, I'm having
00:36a little fun here. I think everybody got it except you. I don't know why that is, but I'm
00:42sorry. Go ahead. Look, the president clearly wants to determine the results of this election
00:53by engaging in anything other than just persuasion that he's got a program and he's got policies
00:58that will benefit the American people. So they're trying mid-decade gerrymandering, extreme
01:04gerrymandering. Even that seems to be boomeranging against them in Texas as a number of the districts
01:12that the president thought were going to be custom-made for him to take back Congress now
01:17are rejecting that ploy against democracy. Voter suppression laws and, of course, extraordinary
01:24efforts at executive branch interference with the administration of elections in the states.
01:30But the Supreme Court yesterday rejected, in a 7-2 decision, the president's key gambit
01:38of trying to block mail-in balloting in the states, finding that he had no likelihood of success
01:45on the merits because, of course, the president simply has no constitutional role in the administration
01:51of elections, much less does the post office, other than just to deliver the mails. There's no power
01:57to compel the states of the United States to submit their voter lists with all of the private
02:06information included to the federal government for the federal government's inspection. And there
02:12would be severe and irreparable harm caused by throwing 50 different monkey wrenches into the
02:20administration of elections in the last eight weeks. So he could not even get it through what
02:25he thought was his safely stacked impact Supreme Court. So pro-Trump extreme that they dealt him,
02:34for the first time in American history, immunity for violent or for any felony crimes committed
02:42under the auspices of his office. So in some sense, this is over. I'm afraid this hearing is in
02:52ideological service of a scheme that was repudiated yesterday in the Supreme Court. It was defeated.
03:01My colleagues, to me, appear a little bit like those Confederate soldiers who were off in the forest when
03:07the surrendered Appomattox took place. And they just kept fighting for weeks and months. They wanted to
03:14convince us that our electoral system is riddled with fraud, and we should turn it over to the 34-count
03:21convicted felon fraudster to run our elections instead. That's what's going to work. But it's not
03:31working. They have tried to compel dozens and dozens of states to turn over their state voter rolls. The
03:41states have rejected it. Both blue states and red states and purple states have rejected it. And the
03:46administration has been repudiated in two dozen different courts in this effort. All right, but here
03:54we are. What is our last subcommittee hearing in the infamously unproductive 119th Congress about
04:02today? It's about a clerical error by the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission, a clerical error that was
04:09caught not by the U.S. Post Office, not by President Trump and his team of crack prosecutors at the
04:18Department of Justice, who've had no fewer than a dozen of their vindictive and selective Trump-ordered
04:24political prosecutions and investigations thrown out of court or quashed for people like James Comey,
04:30Letitia James, Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly, Maggie Goodlander, Jason Crow, Alyssa Slotkin, or take,
04:36for example, my constituent Davey Hearn, the three-time Olympian canoeist and beloved teacher in Montgomery
04:44County, Maryland, who was set up on completely bogus, trumped-up charges of felony destruction of
04:50federal property because he put his hand in the reflecting pool and they were looking for someone
04:55else to blame for the toxic algae that has spread through the pool because of all of the mismanagement
05:02and incompetence of Donald Trump's pool guy from Mar-a-Lago who got the $16 million insider no-bid contract
05:12to work on that. So it was not any of those prosecutors who determined that there was a problem
05:19in New Jersey. No, they were working on more important things. No, the clerical error that we
05:27convene to discuss today was discovered and announced publicly by the New Jersey state government itself.
05:35Federalism in action. And this mistake did not affect the outcome of a single election in New
05:41Jersey from borough counselor or township committee person to governor. Some 6,600 New Jersey non-citizen
05:49residents were improperly registered to vote for one year because of a software computer error made by
05:55the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission. These non-citizens had not done anything wrong. The software
06:00erroneously placed them on the voter rolls. 400 of them, or one in 17, actually voted. There's no
06:07evidence that the outcome of any race was swayed by these votes which constituted less than one hundredth
06:13of one percent of the over four million votes cast in New Jersey in 2024. It's obviously unacceptable
06:21and egregious that even this small mistake occurred. It is federal law that US citizens and only US citizens
06:27can vote in our federal elections. And the previous New Jersey governor and administration should have
06:32informed the public of this blunder sooner, even if mathematically it had no impact or could have had
06:39no impact on the outcome of any race. But no matter how much our colleagues seek to inflate it, a
06:45clerical
06:45error is not structural corruption, much less is it a criminal conspiracy. It does not rise to the level of,
06:52say, a violent insurrection deliberately incited and organized to overthrow a completed presidential
06:59election or a coercive effort to get the vice president of the United States to reject the
07:04electoral college votes cast by millions of people in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and other states.
07:10It is not an act of attempted criminal fraud in the voting system like telling the secretary of state of
07:16Georgia, just find me 11,780 votes. That's not an attempt to block voter fraud. That's an attempt to commit
07:24voter fraud. Governor Sherrill, our former colleague here in the House, has been commendably forthcoming
07:30about how the mistake in her state occurred and she is demanding precise answers about the whole snafu.
07:38After announcing its existence publicly, her administration has taken aggressive remediation efforts.
07:43She's not doubling down on trying to promote voter fraud. She is coming clean about what happened
07:50in the past and is taking aggressive efforts to rectify to ensure that all voter rolls are accurate
07:57today and will be accurate in the future. The state continues to investigate how it happened,
08:02contracting with a private law firm to lead an outside investigation headed up by a Republican former U.S.
08:09attorney, Jeffrey Chiesa. And it is committed to sharing the results of that investigation with
08:15all of the people of New Jersey. If only the Trump administration were as willing to identify and admit
08:22its mistakes and try to fix them rather than doubling down on its errors and its voter suppression schemes
08:29with comical lies and bravado. They're still denying that Joe Biden won the election in 2020,
08:37where he beat Donald Trump by more than seven million votes, 306 to 232 in the Electoral College. And they
08:44continue to lie about that to this day. When the Iran war sent inflationary shockwaves to our economy,
08:53driving up gasoline prices by more than a dollar a gallon, Donald Trump never admitted his colossal
08:59blunder in going around congressional authority to declare war. It's only in the power of Congress to
09:05declare war. So he got us into a stupid, self-defeating, counterproductive, costly inflationary war.
09:12Have they admitted it? No, they've denied it. They've claimed victory, I don't know, a dozen times.
09:18They're all over the map with it. When their ICE agents shot dead two American citizens in cold
09:23blood on the streets of Minneapolis, did they admit the mistake and come clean and say,
09:28we're going to do a thorough, complete investigation and open up to the public? Not for one second.
09:33Is DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, who spent hundreds of millions of our dollars on customized jets with
09:40bedrooms and full bars and PR stunts like photo shoots of her riding horseback at Mount Rushmore,
09:47called the victims of government violence domestic terrorists. And they have never apologized either for
09:53their original act or for defaming the people they killed. You get the point. When over 100 of the
10:01January 6th rioters pardoned all mass by Donald Trump went out and criminally re-offended, including
10:07by sexually assaulting and exploiting 12-year-old children, robbing houses with domestic invasions,
10:14strangling people, threatening to kill FBI agents, Donald Trump never once confessed his dangerous error or
10:21did anything to rectify it. He didn't apologize to anybody. Governor Sherrill is showing how real
10:28leaders take responsibility for the mistakes of government, even if it wasn't her mistake. She
10:34takes responsibility for what the government of New Jersey did. That's what we can trust, but we can't
10:39trust somebody who just covers it all up. Some people in America want to use this isolated mistake in
10:48New Jersey to restrict and blockade the voting rights of millions of Americans. But the facts are
10:54clear. Non-citizen voting is exceedingly rare. It's an accident if it does take place overwhelmingly,
11:01and it has resulted in the places where it's happened with just as many votes for Donald Trump as for
11:06somebody not voting for Donald Trump. But the majority is determined to force through an unnecessary
11:11solution to a non-existent problem. They promoted the SAVE Act as the only way to address this
11:18imaginary crisis, despite every independent analysis not only confirming that non-citizen voting is
11:23remarkably rare, but the SAVE Act would lead to millions of Americans being thrown off of the voter
11:30rolls. This drive is not about ensuring the integrity of elections. If it were, Trump would not have gutted
11:36the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. He would not have disbanded the DOJ and FBI Foreign
11:43Influence Threats Task Force. He would not have fired the head of the US Cyber Command. Donald Trump has
11:50hollowed out the structural safeguards in our electoral process and will point to the damage he's caused
11:56as further proof that our elections cannot be trusted. So this is not about election integrity. This is about
12:04his continuing but fortunately foiled plan to try and disrupt and undermine our electoral process
12:12before we vote on November 3rd. We encourage all fellow Americans, whatever your politics, whatever
12:19your party, to make sure that you exercise your right to vote, including by taking advantage of early
12:24voting and mail-in balloting as Donald Trump himself did in Florida. And do not buy all of the last
12:31-minute
12:31propaganda and distortion and offensives against American political democracy. I yield back, Mr. Chairman.
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