House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., criticized Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., on Friday called him “the ultimate hypocrite” in response to a new report that Raskin stopped short of certifying a 2024 presidential candidate. won for former President Trump.
“Raskin’s ranking member is a hypocrite,” Comer told Fox News Digital. “He talks a big game about ‘saving democracy’ but actively undermines it by sowing the seeds of doubt in free and fair American elections when it benefits him.”
Comer blasted Raskin as a “second-election denier,” saying Raskin “suggested the 2000 election was invalid and did not certify the election results when Trump won the White House in 2016.”
“Now Raskin’s ranking member is signaling that he will do the same thing if Trump wins again in November. Raskin doesn’t care about democracy at all. He only cares about putting a Democrat in the White House at any cost,” Comer said.
Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee and a former member of the Jan. 6 committee, told Axios in a report published Thursday that former President Trump “won a free, fair and honest election, so we will certainly accept that.” The report went on to say that Raskin said he “certainly” did not think the former president would use “free, fair and honest means” to win the Oval Office.
Trump “does everything he can to try to disrupt the process, whether we’re talking about manipulating the electoral college count in Nebraska or manipulating the vote count in Georgia or imposing various constraints,” Raskin told Axios.
Several other Democratic members of Congress shared Raskin’s sentiments, including Rep. Illinois Jan Schakowsky and Rep. Massachusetts Jim McGovern. McGovern told Axios that Democrats would confirm that Trump wins “assuming everything goes as expected.”
Rep. Elise Stefanik, RN.Y., also called the Democrat’s statement “the most predictable hypocrisy in politics.”
“After years of radical leftist stenographers in the mainstream media, corporate special interest groups and radical Democrats ruthlessly disparaging President Trump and Republicans for standing up for electoral integrity, now 24 days until Election Day, Democrats on the left are claiming that President Trump’s victory will it’s illegal, and the mainstream media remains silent,” Stefanik told Fox News Digital.
Raskin responded to the criticism in a statement to Fox News Digital, saying, “The Democratic Party is the party of democracy and the rule of law. We stand by both.
“Trump and his followers have tried to use fraud, deceit, lies, coercion, trickery, voter suppression and mass insurrectionary violence to seize power against the rules of our constitutional order,” Raskin said. “I will not back down from defending America’s constitutional democracy against big lies, political coups and violent insurrections. And I certainly will not get into the mud with Chairman Comer and call him a hypocrite because that would show he has principles and ideals to betray.”
Top Democrats criticized House Speaker Mike Johnson last month after he was asked whether he would comply with the regular order to certify the results of the election if Vice President Kamala Harris were to win.
“Well, of course – if we have free, fair and secure elections, we will follow the Constitution. Absolutely. Yes we have. Absolutely,” Johnson said.
Election certification was also hit during the vice presidential debate a few weeks ago, when Sen. JD Vance was pressed on past comments saying he would not vote to certify the results of the 2020 election in January 2021.
Vance disputed the proposition that Trump could prove to be a “threat to democracy,” saying he believes “we really do have a threat to democracy in this country” with censorship.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz returned to the 2021 exchange, blasting Trump and Republicans for rejecting the events that took place on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol building.
