Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) Talks About His Take On Robert Hur's testimony On President Biden's Classified Document's Case
Interview
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"Well, I like the fact that he stuck by the conclusions of his report, which were that President Biden should not be charged criminally for anything, and he stuck by the statement that President Biden had cooperated fully and unhesitatingly in the investigation. And then he stuck by his own elaborate contrast between Biden and Trump, because Trump tried to hide evidence.
He tried to destroy evidence. He lied about the evidence. And he kept these classified documents for months before he turned some of them, but not all of them over. And so he really pointed out this was apples and oranges.
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He wandered pretty far afield from what his real charge is and was really. The whole thing could have ended after the very first sentence when he concluded that there were no grounds and no warrant for criminal charges.
So I can understand some of my colleague's frustration with him having added those words, which he must have known would have been politically explosive. But I got to say that those words did not have the same kind of charge at all today in the wake of President Biden's triumphant State of the Union address, where he was on performance for several hours. He gave a brilliant speech. It was a political game changer. And then he engaged in a lot of amusing and effective repartee with all of the rhetorical ninja fighters and hecklers of the Freedom Caucus. And he showed exactly how with it he is. And so I think that really took the edge off of those comments about how he was an older man with a weak memory and all that.
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I mean, all of that hypothetical speculation and second guessing of his own decision really does seem to veer outside of the proper boundaries of prosecutorial conduct. And it does seem as if he was bending over backwards to send a political message to his allies in the Republican Party that although there weren't grounds to go forward for criminal prosecution, he was going to throw them a bone or two. And I can understand Congressman Schiff's frustration about that. I
shared that somewhat. But again, I think that President Biden just wiped all of that stuff out. He has framed what this election and what this administration is about. It's about defending democracy and freedom.
And as I said today, it is a memory test, but it's not a memory test for President Biden. It's a memory test for America, do we remember fascism, do we remember Nazism and communism and totalitarianism, do we know what we're up against in terms of the authoritarian forces that have rallied around Donald Trump, including Viktor Orban, who had a slumber party at Mar-a-Lago over the weekend and came out pronouncing how pleased he was that Donald Trump had said he would not give one penny to the people of Ukraine resisting Orban's friend, Vladimir Putin's filthy, imperialist, bloody invasion and war against the people of Ukraine. That's what the election is about. That's our real memory test.
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You bet."
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