Viral Quote Attributed to Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin Is Fabricated

Social media users, including actress Roseanne Barr and a Republican National Committee official, are circulating a quote attributed to Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland in which he claims “we won’t be certifying the election” if Donald Trump wins. The quote is fabricated.

On Monday evening, an X user with more than 150,000 followers tweeted: “BREAKING: Jamie Raskin said, ‘Let folks cast their votes for Trump if that’s their choice. But mark my words, we won’t be certifying the election. He might win, but we’ll ensure he doesn’t step foot in the Oval Office.’” The post, which includes a photo of Raskin but does not link to a news story or other potential source of the quote, has received 7.2 million views as of Tuesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after it was posted.  

Republican National Committee official Harmeet Dhillon, who currently leads the Arizona GOP’s Election Integrity Team, responded to the quote, and tweeted, “Isn’t this an insurrection?” Actress Roseanne Barr tweeted the quote to her 1.4 million followers, adding the quote is “from the people who say we are a threat to democracy.”

“Odds are quite high this is provocation meant to result in violence in order to justify doing exactly what he’s saying,” Republican New Hampshire state legislator Mike Belcher tweeted in response. “Consider everything they’re going to be throwing at you designed to elicit a certain reaction from you.”

“Vote today to piss off this insurrectionist Jamie Raskin,” right-wing internet personality Rogan O’Handley, whose DC Draino X account has more than 1.8 million followers, tweeted on Tuesday.

Raskin responded to the tweet in a post and stated he had not said anything of the sort. “This fictional ‘quote’ is 100% fabricated,” Raskin tweeted on Tuesday from his official congressional X account. “It’s one more lie in the stream of right-wing lies designed to undermine our election. Despite this actionable libel and all the disinformation, America is having a free and fair election and Congress will certify the winner.”

In addition to Raskin’s denial, The Dispatch Fact Check could find no instances of the quote appearing in any news stories or social media posts. While the quote that is going viral is fabricated, Raskin has a history of calling into question Trump’s eligibility for office.

Earlier this month, Raskin told Axios that if Trump “won a free, fair and honest election, then we would obviously accept it,” when asked whether he would consider objecting to the electoral votes cast in the 2024 race. However, he added the former president “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.” 

In December 2023, Raskin defended Colorado and Maine’s decision not to allow Trump to appear on the ballot, arguing the former president is disqualified from holding public office under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. “Donald Trump is in that tiny, tiny number of people who have essentially disqualified themselves,” Raskin said live on CNN. “Well, that’s the rules of the Constitution,” he added. 

The text of that section reads: 

No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

The Supreme Court took up the Colorado case and in March ruled in an unsigned opinion that only Congress, not the states, had the authority to enforce Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. Shortly after oral arguments in Trump v. Anderson but before the ruling came down, Raskin spoke on the issue at a bookstore in Washington D.C. “Last night, I was most worried about the Supreme Court’s prospective imminent abdication of its very clear duty to disqualify Donald Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and what that might mean if their decision says that it’s really up to Congress on January 5 or January 6, 2025, to disqualify him at the counting of the Electoral College votes, which really could lead to something akin to civil war,” he said. 

Later, at the same event, Raskin accused the Supreme Court of misinterpreting the Insurrection Clause, which he said the court was “just disappearing with a magic wand as if it doesn’t exist.”

“They want to kick it to Congress so it’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified and then we need bodyguards for everybody in civil war conditions,” Raskin said. “All because the nine justices—not all of them—but these justices who … simply do not want to do their job and interpret what the great 14th Amendment means.”

The Dispatch Fact Check has reached out to Raskin’s congressional office for comment and clarification on his current views regarding congressional certification of the 2024 presidential electors. 

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