When Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin spoke during a committee hearing Wednesday, he left Republican lawmakers smoldering in his wake. In a fiery speech, the congressman from Maryland called out the GOP for their “shocking nihilism about what’s true and what’s false” as he slammed the party over its Jan. 6 insurrection disinformation campaign.
Raskin started by asking the question, “How do we know what’s true or false?” He then launched into a beautiful and brilliant address to answer that question. “The whole judicial system is based on the difference between truth and lies,” he said.
“Our system operates on the basis of truth or fact. Don’t throw your hands up and say, ‘Oh, we can’t know what the truth is. We can’t know what lies are. We don’t want bureaucrats telling us what that is.’ That’s what democratic government is. That’s how we operate. That’s why people go to court, and they swear an oath, to tell the truth.”
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Raskin, who served on the Jan. 6 committee, addressed the “nonsense” allegations that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 election and the ongoing machinations over the party’s insistence on election fraud.
“Donald Trump lost that election by over 7 million votes,” Raskin said. “Then their big lie is to stretch all the way over to January 6. We have to disbelieve the evidence of our own eyes.”
He added:
“They’re back on the news with big lies saying, ‘No, no, no, it was a tourist visit,’ like these real tourists up here, who have to come and watch representatives in the United States Congress say there’s no difference between truth and lies … Real tourists who are not beating the daylights out of our police officers.”
Raskin referred to Fox News host Tucker Carlson's revisionist production of cherry-picked security clips from the day a mob of insurrectionists invaded the U.S. Capitol, beat law enforcement, defaced the building, and stole government property.
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Carlson managed to find footage he could show and used this voiceover:
“They were orderly and meek. These were not insurrectionists, they were sightseers. Footage from inside the Capitol overturns the story you’ve heard about January 6. Protesters queue up in neat little lines. They give each other tours outside the speaker’s office. They take cheerful selfies and they smile. They’re not destroying the Capitol, they obviously revere the Capitol. They’re there because they believe the election was stolen from them. They believe in the system.”
As Capitol Police Staff Sergeant Aquilino Gonell explained to Daily Kos in June, Jan. 6 was no tour around the building.
Gonell is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He says that during his time in Iraq, he knew there was a possibility that he might not return home alive. He says he even broke up with his girlfriend at the time so she wouldn’t have to face the possibility of his death. But what he faced on Jan. 6 was worse than his time as a soldier in Iraq. What retraumatizes him daily is that the same lawmakers he was protecting continue to downplay the violence he and his fellow officers experienced.
“When we were fighting in the lower west terrace entrance, that to me was a pivotal moment that allowed a lot of the members of Congress and senators to escape from harm … We put our lives on the line, as we should have done. It didn't matter what party we supported. Our job is to protect the members of Congress and the legislative branch and everybody who works there—regardless of our political affiliation,” Gonell said.