Raskin: DOJ staff worried it will become 'Trump law firm'

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) suggested in a recent interview that the Department of Justice (DOJ) staff is worried it will become a “law firm” for President-elect Trump during his second stint in the White House.

His claim came shortly after Trump tapped former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to lead the DOJ following former Rep. Matt Gaetz's (R-Fla.) withdrawal from consideration.

“So, she’s really presiding over the bureaucracy," Raskin, the ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, told MSNBC's "Alex Wagner Tonight" in an interview Thursday. "That is where she will be the key transmission belt between Donald Trump’s orders and then making the bureaucracy move."

“That, of course, is what everybody at the Department of Justice is so afraid of, that there will be a wholesale abandonment of the law and Constitution and it will basically become like the Donald Trump law firm,” he added.

Gaetz halted his quest to be the nation’s top prosecutor on Thursday, after facing an uphill climb to secure enough votes in the Senate to get confirmed. Hours later, Trump announced Bondi, who served as Florida’s attorney general from 2011 to 2019, as his next pick.

Raskin, a vocal Trump critic, said that if Bondi ends up getting confirmed for the post, she would be tasked with defending Trump’s campaign promise to deport millions of migrants.

Trump has repeatedly promised to carry out the "largest deportation effort in American history."

“So, she would obviously be the chief lawyer in charge of that operation and defending it against everybody suing, presuming that it’s done in the way they’ve done things in the past, which is running completely roughshod over people’s civil rights and civil liberties and what the law does,” Raskin said.

Before winning the presidential election, Trump told podcast host Joe Rogan in an interview last month that one of his "biggest" mistakes was picking disloyal people to serve during his first administration.

“The biggest mistake I made was I picked some people. I picked some great people, you know, but you don’t think about that. I picked some people that I shouldn’t have picked,” he said at the time.