- There's a ton of fraud, waste, and abuse, and Donald Trump is behind most of it.

In fact, they're not the opponents of corruption.

They are the instruments and the agents of corruption.

The Elon Musk factor is something I think that I had probably underestimated the extent to which he would be the co-president or the de facto president.

We've gotta act with real courage and defiance at the same time that we're organizing for a landslide repudiation of this nightmare in the 2026 elections.

- Coming up on "Laura Flanders & Friends," the place where the people who say it can't be done, take a back seat to the people who are doing it, welcome.

(light playful music) An administration elected for a second term has a chance to do what it couldn't before and time to refine its tactics.

Donald Trump has had plenty of help coming up with a plan and his best tactic has always been shock and awe.

And so that is just what we have seen since November's election.

Even before Trump took office, important shapers of public opinion obeyed in advance.

I'm thinking of ABC, the Washington Post, the LA Times, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Google, even Bill Gates.

And when opinion shapers like these settle and concede, they create the impression that everyone is bowing down.

Then comes the hail of executive orders, 65 in less than a month, resulting in mass firings, funding freezes, academic and arts chills, and that a non-governmental office headed by an unelected billionaire, the invasion of a hoard of personal data snatchers.

Shocking, annoying, and sucking up all the coverage, it is easy to think that the executive's power is in fact absolute.

And then, something like this happens.

- Mr. Speaker, I begin with an urgent constitutional public service announcement based on millions of calls and messages that have been flooding Congress.

There is a serial constitutional violator at large, right now in the District of Columbia.

Whose overall project to dismantle our constitution and rule of law, is now the target or subject of at least a dozen different federal court temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions across the land, and also faces emergency civil actions in dozens of other courts and jurisdictions.

The suspect has been described as a very evil individual by Steve Bannon and has been operating in clandestine fashion with a night crew of computer-hacking juvenile associates, one of whom goes by the alias of "... .....", and another one they call "The Kid", who has been known to post racist and anti-semitic provocations online.

The accelerating spree of constitutional offenses alarming the nation involves dozens of episodes of computer fraud and data theft, affecting potentially 300 million Americans and escalating threats against congressionally created federal agencies serving the people.

From NIH, to the National Weather Service, to NOAA, to the Department of Justice.

- So that was Jamie Raskin, fourth term Maryland congressman, constitutional law professor, and now ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, offering a public service announcement on the floor of the House, February 13th.

And even in these first weeks, he has not been alone.

Pushing back against the Trump-Musk power snatch, we've seen the courts, people in Congress, and yes, even on the streets, cracks appearing in that perception of absolute power.

And so today, because Trump's only as unaccountable as he's permitted to be, we're gonna talk with Congressman Raskin about what we are in fact witnessing.

Is it absolute power corrupting absolutely or resolute public pushback that's got every reason to get stronger by the minute?

Representative Raskin, as you will remember, was the lead impeachment manager in the second impeachment trial of former, now current president Donald Trump, and served on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Welcome back to "Laura Flanders & Friends", Congressman.

It is always my pleasure and honor to have you.

- I'm thrilled to be with you, Laura, and thanks for hanging tough.

- Well, you bet, you're setting a standard.

I wonder, given your experience, and everything you already knew about shock and awe and Trump's tactics, whether you were in fact shocked and awed by anything that you've seen thus far?

- Well, the Elon Musk factor is something I think that I had probably underestimated the extent to which he would be the co-president or the de facto president of the country.

- And what's your role now there as house ranking member on the Judiciary Committee?

- Well, I see it in terms of short, medium, and long term.

Short term, we've gotta do everything in our power to stop the onslaught, the violation of the data privacy rights of the people, the attempt to usurp congressional lawmaking power, simply to extinguish federal departments and agencies that we created and only we have the power to nullify.

You know, we've gotta defend the civil service rights of tens of thousands of federal workers that are under attack.

We've gotta defend the rights of immigrants, the LGBTQ community, and we are winning in court.

We have more than a dozen preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders that have been instituted against everything from the outrageous birthright citizenship nullification executive order, which tried to turn 8 or 9 million US citizens into undocumented immigrants to the ripoff of people's data, to the attempt to round up FBI agents who had the temerity simply to do their jobs by working on the January 6th insurrection.

So right now, the rule of law is holding, the federal district courts are doing their job.

I know that Trump and Vance and the gang are just waiting to get everything into the Supreme Court because there they believe that the Right-wing majority, which Donald Trump stacked and packed and gerrymandered the court for, will hold for him.

- I am gonna have you talk a bit more about Musk.

As you said, he in a way has become the kind of wild card.

He gave a very strange press conference with the President or the President with him, where he argued that they, or at least Trump, had a mandate to, as he put it, root out fraud, waste, and abuse.

- [Reporter] Your detractors, Mr. Musk.

- I have to what?

- Including a lot of Democrats.

- I have detractors?

- You do, sir.

- I don't believe it.

- They say that you're orchestrating a hostile takeover of government and doing it in a non-transparent way.

What's your response to that criticism?

- Well, first of all, you couldn't ask for a stronger mandate from the public.

The public voted, you know, they have a majority of the public voting for President Trump.

Won the House or won the Senate.

The people voted for major government reform.

There should be no doubt about that.

That was on the campaign.

The president spoke about that at every rally.

The people voted for major government reform.

And that's what people are gonna get.

- There are many people, Congressman, who say, "Well, there is a lot of fraud, waste, and abuse," to which you respond how?

- Well, there's a ton of fraud, waste, and abuse and Donald Trump is behind most of it.

In fact, they're not the opponents of corruption.

They are the instruments and the agents of corruption here.

The first thing they did when they got in on Friday of inauguration week was to sack 17 inspectors general.

These are the people who are actually the corruption, waste, fraud, abuse fighters in the federal government.

They got rid of them immediately, violating the law and the process because they're required to come to Congress 30 days before they would sack any of these people.

And they need to set forth specifically the rationale for getting rid of them.

They didn't do that in any case.

And the rationale is actually a very large one, because Elon Musk himself is facing hundreds of complaints in federal departments and agencies, including the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, where there are tons of complaints against Tesla's consumer predatory practices to the Agency for International Development, which was literally investigating Elon Musk when he took over their department and shut it all down.

He was being investigated for his company's ties to the Chinese government and his complicity with Vladimir Putin's fascist assault on the people of Ukraine.

- There is something else going on there that I do want you to talk about though, Congressman, and that is this question of access to personal private information, that the head official at the Social Security Administration quit when Musk's folks asked for access to all this data.

She said there's no way to overstate how serious this is.

What's at stake?

What is so dangerous about what is happening there with respect to our data?

- Well, the real experts are saying this is the greatest security data breach in American history because what you've got is a guy who is himself a businessman, now masquerading as a special government employee.

He's refused to fill out or publicize his ethics statement.

He's got no conflict of interest waiver despite the fact that he's got all of these conflicts of interest, not just in terms of cases and investigations against him, but he is a multi-billion dollar defense contractor.

So he is got access to all of the financial data relating to the government's work with him, all of his rivals and anybody else in the business.

- And he also wants to launch a payment platform, right?

X Money?

- He's in the middle of launching this new payment platform with Visa and he of course started his career with PayPal.

Now he's taking over all the financial payment systems of the US government with all of our data on them.

That's people's names, addresses, family members, social security numbers, financial data history; in some cases, medical history if you're talking about a medical platform like NIH or Medicare or Medicaid.

Basically, this might be the most valuable trove of personal data that exists anywhere in the world today or in history and he wants to go in business doing this.

Now, of course, he's just following Donald Trump who now rejects any idea that there's a conflict between his being in business, making as much money as possible, and him being the president of the United States.

- All right, so what can we do about an unelected guy like Musk?

I mean, how does the Constitution handle an unelected official operating in this kind of capacity?

- Yeah, well, there's some ambiguities to whether or not he's a principal officer or an inferior officer, or not even that.

But high ranking officers can be impeached and it would be nice to impeach him as the de facto president of the United States.

I don't know if that's possible.

Of course, he's not qualified constitutionally to be president because he was born in South Africa.

He also is raking in billions of dollars of foreign government emoluments while he's acting as the de facto president.

And he has violated Congress's lawmaking power under Article I by arrogating himself the authority simply to extinguish entire federal departments and agencies that we created.

We are the lawmaking branch.

The job of the president or the fake president under Article II is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.

That means the president has got to implement our will even if he disagrees with the policy or how much money we're spending, or in what way we're spending it.

- Well then, that brings us to Congress.

In the last few days, I've heard a lot of people saying, "Where's the hue and cry?"

Ezra Klein in the "New York Times" described Congress as "supine".

A conservative columnist in the "Wall Street Journal" said, "Isn't it great there is a lowered temperature in Washington D.C.?"

Hakeem Jeffries got into trouble for this comment.

- I'm trying to figure out what leverage we actually have.

What leverage do we have?

They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency.

It's their government.

What leverage do we have?

- It sounds to me as if you do think Congress has leverage.

- Of course we do.

The people have leverage and we're part of the people.

You know, there's no mandate here.

Trump got less than 50% of the vote.

He won with around 2 million votes.

Joe Biden beat him by 7 million votes the last time out there.

So we've gotta act with real courage and defiance at the same time that we're organizing for a landslide repudiation of this nightmare in the 2026 elections.

- All right, so let's talk about the next chance where there really could be a showdown and that's around the budget.

You've got trillions more, $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

It does make things pretty clear what all this has been about.

What possibilities do the Democrats have, your caucus have to really fight here?

And what does the GOP really have to bargain with given that there's no guarantees that the appropriations will actually be allowed to stand?

- They have not consulted us on anything.

They don't need to.

If they can maintain their unity and their majorities, then they don't need us.

And they've shown that's their preference.

But if they can't do that, because there are 40 or 50 Republican members who have never voted to lift the debt ceiling and they won't do that and there are others who are mad about certain things, then they've gotta come to us and they've gotta negotiate.

They've gotta engage in that old fashioned political art of a legislative compromise and a negotiation.

And that's what they'll have to do.

But I can guarantee you, I don't know any Democrats who are saying that we should keep the government of the United States open so they can dismantle the government of the United States.

- One of the moments that will really test you and the Constitution that we cherish is this question of what happens if the executive branch just decides not to obey the judicial branch?

If there's a judicial decision that comes down where we can see that there is an intent to disobey, there've been some examples of not implementing decisions, but we aren't quite there yet, I don't think.

If we do get there, you correct me if I'm wrong, but if we do get there, what happens then?

- So, and there's a lot of anxiety about that.

People ask me all the time, what happens when they start disobeying all of these injunctions and they just, you know, quote that apocryphal story from Andrew Jackson, you know, "The Supreme Court's made its decision, let them enforce it."

But at the district court level and at the appeals court level and at the state court level, it's really not that much of a problem because a court that is intent on actually enforcing the rule of law has a full panoply of sanctions that can be used against a recalcitrant or disobedient executive branch.

That's what criminal contempt is about.

That's what civil contempt is about.

Now, when it gets to the Supreme Court, you know, if the Supreme Court, you know, the main damage the Supreme Court can do is to decide for Trump, as we saw they did in that outrageous presidential immunity case, where they said the president can commit felony crimes under the auspices of his office, and he is presumptively immune to prosecution, categorically and presumptively immune to prosecution in that category of cases.

But let's say the Supreme Court upholds what the lower courts are doing and says the president has gotta comply and the President refuses that.

Well, at that point, he's going up against a court that he stacked in his own interest for himself.

And I think we would see a huge political turn against him.

And that's what ultimately impeachment and trial and conviction are all about.

- But aren't you putting a lot of hope then in Trump's Supreme Court there?

What if, to the contrary, they go along and permit him to fire whoever he likes and do whatever he wants, then we've got precedent, how do we unravel that?

- Well, that's the tough question.

It's like this rancid presidential immunity decision that was rendered by the court.

But look, the fact is that for most of American history, the Supreme Court has been a profoundly conservative and reactionary institution.

I mean, think of it.

The Supreme Court did nothing for enslaved people in America for the entire history before the Civil War, other than to cement that system into place in the Dred Scott decision.

And then even after the Civil War and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans and the reconstruction amendments, they went back to the same basic idea in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson.

So the court has never been on the side of the people and the people are just going to have to rise to the occasion in this case, like people have risen the occasion even with all of the civilizing movements of American history, the Civil Rights Movement, Abolition, the Women's Movement, the LGBTQ Movement, the peace movement, the environmental movement, it's going to be up to the people.

It is never going to be the political elites who save us.

- Well, that takes me to history and that takes me to your very own precious father, Marcus Raskin.

I mean, we have had constitutional crises before and he was right in the middle of one of them during the Vietnam War.

He issued a "call to resist illegitimate authority", and I'm wondering if you're gonna issue something similar.

Then, the danger was kind of Military Industrial Complex.

Biden has called today's danger the "Digital Industrial Complex".

Tell us a bit about your father's tactics and whether you think they would apply today or what are yours on that level?

- Well, my dad's case is a really interesting one that Boston Five, the famous Dr. Spock case with Marcus Raskin and Dr. Benjamin Spock, William Sloane Coffin, Michael Ferber, Mitchell Goodman was the fifth.

They were indicted for conspiracy to aid and abet draft resistance.

And my father had written that statement that made him famous, "A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority," which was published in a bunch of the newspapers, them not having the internet back in the day.

And he was prosecuted for what was essentially free speech.

He was the only one of the five who was actually acquitted at the trial level, which led to an interview in the "New York Times" where they asked him how he felt about being acquitted.

And he said he felt like demanding a retrial.

Because for them, unlike all the Right wingers who go off and get their own lawyers and point fingers at each other, it was about solidarity and sticking together.

Eventually, all of those convictions were reversed on First Amendment grounds that people have a right to speak out against a war, certainly an unjust and illegal war as that one was.

But my dad was convinced that people had to stick with the law and the Constitution and he said the Vietnam War was a war that was contrary to international law.

There were war crimes taking place.

It was a violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Nuremberg accord.

But he felt like domestically, that we had to act in the spirit of nonviolent protest as citizens.

And he didn't really adopt that kind of Gandhian, Thoreauvian idea that, you know, we are civil disobedience.

He was saying that the movements, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, were movements to get the country to conform to the law, to the Constitution.

- And this was somebody who had served in the White House, had worked inside government, moved outside government, became an advocate for years, one of the co-founders of the Institute for Policy Studies, was involved in the Pentagon Papers, and the great whistleblower action of that time.

He then went on to talk about a social reconstruction.

And I guess that's where I want to end our conversation, is you talked about the upcoming midterms.

And it does seem to me that the Democrats will not win by defending what to many people seems like indefensible status quo institutions, whether you're talking about the FBI or higher ed or healthcare, even USAID, they were all deeply problematic before Trump and Musk came along.

So how do you think the Democrats need to retool?

I mean, you can't rail against oligarchs without dismissing your own oligarchs.

You know, will they take on what Bernie Sanders calls the billionaire class?

Big questions, but?

- Well, we're gonna draw on the strength and the example of the great civilizing movements of our time, which have opened America up.

And we are seeing that full-blown backlash to it right now in MAGA in the attempt to dismantle all of the changes that have been made to make America a more perfect union and a more open society.

But we're gonna build on that to move forward in terms of social institutions that are gonna be far more responsive to everybody, whether we're talking about farmers in the countryside who have been losing billions of dollars now in government contracts for food that was being sent to starving people in other countries, to workers whose rights are being decimated in National Labor Relations Board in the Department of Labor under this process, to all citizens who want to have good healthcare, good schools, a relationship to the truth, a relationship to science that benefits everybody and to meaningful political participation.

So there has been an undertow of fascism and authoritarianism in human history from the beginning.

In fact, democracy, free democracy has been very much an exception.

Most people for most of history and even in the world today, live under autocrats, theocrats, plutocrats, dictators and despots like Vladimir Putin, and like President Xi, and like Kim Jong Un, and Donald Trump and Elon Musk.

The exception is democratic self-government with freedom.

So we get back to that, but we obviously need to use all of the technologies of the new century, including artificial intelligence, to make communities of democratic empowerment stronger and more vibrant and better connected to each other.

The fascists are doing it all over the world.

JD Vance and the Elon Musk are totally in bed with the neofascist parties in Germany and Austria and France and so on.

We need to build strong, transnational democratic alliances to get us through this nightmare so that human rights can be preserved.

- Jamie Raskin, thank you so much for being with us.

It's really been a pleasure and I appreciate you taking the time.

- My pleasure, Laura.

Keep it up and hang tough, all right?

- I know I will and I know you will.

My conversation with Representative Raskin continued, as you'll hear if you subscribe to our free podcast.

Subscribers get the full uncut every week, all the information about subscribing is at our website.

When Donald Trump announced the purging of the leadership of the Kennedy Center for the Arts, our national theater in Washington D.C., there were some people who wondered why he was doing it.

I didn't wonder at all.

I'd seen Viktor Orban do exactly the same thing as part of his effort to cement control over Hungary in 2013.

I was part of a delegation organized by the late great Philip Arnoult to Budapest that year where we watched one of the last performances of the last show put on by the National's artistic director, a man who had just been fired by Orban.

The last play he chose was "Angels in America" and he starred in it.

And as that play drew to its conclusion, there's an extraordinary speech about living and dying and fighting for the future.

"The world spins only forward," the play goes.

"We will be citizens.

The time is now.

The great work begins."

And as those final words landed on the audience, that audience rose as one to clap and cheer and stomp their feet, and perhaps to call down their angels.

I saw how courage could be contagious, each row inspiring the next.

Cowardice too, of course, works that way.

My question to us is, which role will we play in this moment and where will we find our angels?

We'll be keeping an eye out on this program, and I hope that you'll be with us.

For "Laura Flanders & Friends", I'm Laura.

Stay kind, stay curious, till the next time.

Thanks for joining us.

For more on this episode and other forward-thinking content, subscribe to our free newsletter for updates, my commentaries, and our full uncut conversations.

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It's all at lauraflanders.org (lively music)