Rep. Jasmine Crockett didn’t come to whisper. In a packed House Oversight markup last week, the Texas Democrat unloaded a point-by-point indictment of Trump administration corruption, naming names and presenting receipts while Republicans sat mostly silent.
She started with the Epstein files.
“Everyone knows he’s in them,” Crockett said of Trump. “What they’re hiding is the context.”
Then she turned to Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex-trafficker serving 20 years. Trump has repeatedly refused to rule out a pardon or commutation, a move Crockett called “special treatment for someone who helped traffic over a thousand women and girls.”
The sharpest fire was reserved for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Crockett accused Noem of funneling millions in taxpayer dollars to The Strategy Group—a firm that ran her 2022 South Dakota gubernatorial campaign. The company’s CEO is married to Noem’s chief spokesperson, Trisha McLaughlin, and her top policy adviser, Corey Lewandowski, has deep ties to the firm.
“This is what corruption looks like,” Crockett said. “They’re stealing from American pockets and depositing it into their own.”
She didn’t stop there. Border czar Tom Homan was caught on FBI tape accepting a $50,000 cash bribe in a brown paper bag in exchange for federal contracts. The Trump Justice Department quietly killed the probe. Congressional Republicans, Crockett noted, “didn’t say a mumbling word.”
Then there’s Ed Martin—former Jan. 6 rally organizer and self-described “Nazi sympathizer” turned multi-hat insider at DOJ. Martin now serves as associate deputy attorney general, pardon attorney, head of the “weaponization” task force, and special prosecutor on mortgage-fraud cases aimed at Trump critics. Crockett called him “the president’s lap dog sent to initiate lawsuits against political enemies.”
The most stinging contrast came at the end.
While Republicans shield allies from accountability, Crockett pointed out they’re simultaneously gutting real public-safety programs: thousands of FBI positions slashed, over a billion dollars cut from the bureau, ATF funding gutted, juvenile-justice grants zeroed out, and community violence intervention programs eliminated entirely.
“They’re literally defunding the police,” she said, “while protecting sex traffickers and bribe-takers.”
This isn’t just partisan theater. When a secretary of homeland security can steer millions to her own campaign vendors, when a convicted trafficker gets VIP pardon consideration, and when the Justice Department buries bribery cases against the president’s friends, the word “corruption” stops being rhetoric and becomes fact.
Real families—survivors of trafficking, communities bleeding from gun violence—pay the price while the powerful play musical chairs with taxpayer money and presidential pardons.
Crockett ended with a warning that hung in the room: “This is organized crime with the full backing of one political party.”
