Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that former President Donald Trump used government as an “instrument for private self-enrichment.”
Raskin said, “During the Trump administration, we saw the development of a completely new public philosophy which is that government is not an instrument of the common good in the common instrument, government is for the private self-enrichment for the guy that gets in, for his family and his private businesses, and that’s a model we’re seeing all over the world.”
Anchor Jonathan Karl said, “You don’t approve of that model, obviously.”
Raskin said, “I do not. That’s what Putin is doing.”
He continued, “It’s new for America that somebody would get in and just say, you know, everything is corrupt, and I’m just as corrupt as the next guy, and I’m going to take money as Trump did from China, from Saudi Arabia, from the United Arab Emirates. Look, you know, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, pocketed a cool $2 billion.”
Raskin added, “I’m concerned, not just about public officials like Donald Trump and Jared Kushner, but even family members who go along for the ride, and I’ve been begging my colleague, Chairman Comer, for us to do a serious analysis of what the laws should be about money making.”
He concluded, “And we’re going to release a report about all of the foreign government emoluments, millions of dollars, we can document that Donald Trump pocketed at the hotels at the golf courses to business deals when he was president and that his family got. But they’ve not laid a glove on Joe Biden. As President, they haven’t been able to show any criminal corruption on his part — what they’ve got is Hunter Biden.”
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