Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) said Wednesday that former President Trump’s Justice Department would “go on a murder spree” if the presumptive Republican nominee wins a second term in the White House next November.
At a House oversight hearing on the Office of Personnel Management, Pressley warned about what he saw as negative political implications of “Project 2025” — a detailed set of policies, led by the conservative Heritage Foundation, that would drastically reshape the federal government to support a hypothetical future Republican president.
The effort — sometimes referred to as a model for a second Trump administration — would consolidate executive power, reduce funding for many agencies and replace career civil servants with loyal supporters of the president in an executive order known as “Annex F.”
“It is critical that we understand that the far-right extremists who defend Program F see it as a means to an end. It is his path to enacting widespread and widespread political violence,” Pressley said at the hearing.
“One thing I know for sure about Trump and his sycophants is that they telegraph their harm,” she added.
Pressley said she wanted to “sound the alarm” about Project 2025, which she described as a “far-right manifesto” that is “a 1,000-page list of extremist policies that would uproot every government agency and disrupt every person’s life.” ”. who calls this country home.”
Pressley criticized Project 2025’s stance on the use of the death penalty — a practice the Massachusetts Democrat has long fought to abolish.
“The Justice Department would go on a murder spree,” she said. “He would rush to use the death penalty and expand its use to even more people while circumventing due process protections.”
Project 2025, according to its text, ask “the next conservative administration” to “do everything possible to obtain final sentencing for the 44 prisoners currently on federal death row.”
Only 16 people have been executed by the federal government since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1988. Most executions are imposed under the states’ respective death penalty laws.
The Trump administration carried out 13 of 16 executions in the final months of its term.
In a statement to The Hill, Trump spokesman Steven Cheung rejected Pressley’s characterization of Trump’s DOJ agenda during the hearing, calling Pressley an “unserious” person for “using ridiculous language like that.” .
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