Comer slams Raskin as 'ultimate hypocrite' after Raskin stopped short of committing to certify a Trump win
House Oversight Chairman James Comer, R-Ky., criticized Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., Friday, calling him "the ultimate hypocrite" in response to a new report in which Raskin stopped short of committing to certify a potential 2024 presidential win for former President Trump.
"Ranking member Raskin is the ultimate hypocrite," Comer told Fox News Digital. "He talks a big game about ‘saving democracy’ yet actively undermines it by sowing seeds of doubt in America’s free and fair elections when it benefits him to do so."
Comer slammed Raskin as "a two-time election denier," saying Raskin "suggested the 2000 election was illegitimate and didn’t certify election results when Trump won the White House in 2016."
"Now ranking member Raskin is signaling he’d do the same if Trump wins again in November. Raskin doesn’t care at all about democracy. He only cares about putting a Democrat in the White House whatever the cost," Comer said.
Raskin, the top Democrat on the committee and a former Jan. 6 committee member, told Axios in a report published Thursday if former President Trump "won a free, fair and honest election, then we would obviously accept it." The report continued to say that Raskin said he "definitely" does not assume the former president will employ "free, fair and honest means" to win the Oval Office.
Trump "is doing whatever he can to try to interfere with the process, whether we're talking about manipulating electoral college counts in Nebraska or manipulating the vote count in Georgia or imposing other kinds of impediments," Raskin told Axios.
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Several other Democratic members of Congress shared Raskin's sentiments, including Illinois Rep. Jan Schakowsky and Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern. McGovern told Axios Democrats will certify a Trump win "assuming everything goes the way we expect it to."
Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., also called the Democrats' statements "the most predictable hypocrisy in politics."
"After years of the radical left’s stenographers in the mainstream media, corporate special interest groups and radical Democrats viciously smearing President Trump and Republicans for standing up for election integrity, now 24 days until Election Day, far left Democrats are claiming that a President Trump victory would be illegitimate, 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 a 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 never back down from defending American constitutional democracy against their big lies, political coups and violent insurrections. And I certainly won’t get into the mud with Chairman Comer and call him a hypocrite because that would imply he has some principles and ideals to betray."
Top Democrats criticized House Speaker Mike Johnson last month after he was asked if he'd commit to observing regular order in certifying the election results if Vice President Kamala Harris were to win.
"Well, of course — if we have a free, fair and safe election, we're going to follow the Constitution. Absolutely. Yes. Absolutely," Johnson said.
Election certification was also touched upon during the vice presidential debate a few weeks ago, when Sen. JD Vance was pressed on past comments saying he would not have voted to certify the 2020 election results in January 2021.
Vance fired back at the proposition that Trump could prove to be a "threat to democracy," saying he believes "we actually do have a threat to democracy in this country" in the form of censorship.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz circled back to the 2021 exchange, blasting Trump and Republicans for denying the events that unfolded on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building.