Transcription
Look up fraud upon a court. It's a pretty serious charge. I have never ever heard of senior officials of the Department of Justice being called before a court with respect to a fraud upon the court.
This one was brought raised, I guess I should say, by 36, three dozen retired federal judges, some very, very respected ones, some very, very conservative ones. And the judge in the proceeding in Florida out of which the slush fund settlement emerged reopened the case to have a look. She asked for responses. She suggested that the DOJ might have violated its own policies in the settlement. She suggested that there was an IRS defense memo out there that would be relevant to the proceedings.
The violation of DOJ policies would obviously be a matter for DOJ to answer. The IRS client memo would obviously be something for DOJ to answer. She also questioned whether there was collusion. It takes two to collude. It would be a collusion between the Department of Justice lawyers and Trump's private lawyers. So there's another reason for the Department of Justice to have responded.
What happened last Friday? No response from the Department of Justice. First ever accusation of senior-level Department of Justice people of fraud upon the court with an invitation to rebut the allegations, an invitation specific to Department of Justice conduct. And they duck. So that is going to continue. The three dozen judges have their answer this Friday, and then the court will go forward.
I will contend that we don't look like much if that information is being developed in a federal courtroom, and we haven't been allowed to ask questions, and indeed our oversight has been collapsed into a confirmation hearing. I have never seen a Department of Justice as badly run as this one. I've never seen fraud upon the court allegations. I've never seen so many suggestions of contempt. I've never seen so many no true bills. I've never seen so many cases thrown out. I've never seen so many accusations that Department arguments were false, were pretextual, were designed to fool rather than inform the court. And we see that over and over again from judges appointed by every president. It is now at the point where the Department of Justice and the US government have lost their presumption of regularity in federal court proceedings. All of this matters. All of this is something to which this committee should be paying attention.