Rep. Ayanna Pressley says Donald Trump Justice Department would ‘go on a murdering spree’

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) said Wednesday that former President Donald Trump’s Justice Department would “enter the murder-mad era” if presumptive Republican presidential nominee wins a second term in the White House this November.

During a House Office of Personnel Management oversight hearing, Pressley warned of the policy implications of Project 2025. Project 2025 is a detailed policy spearheaded by the conservative Heritage Foundation that would dramatically reshape the federal government to support a hypothetical future Republican president.

The effort, also known as the blueprint for a second Trump administration, would consolidate executive power, cut funding to many government agencies and replace career civil servants with loyal allies of the president in an executive order known as “Schedule F.”

“It’s important to understand that the far-right extremists who advocate for Schedule F see it as a means to an end — it’s a tool for them to carry out widespread, large-scale policy violence,” Pressley said during the hearing.

“One thing I know for sure about Trump and his sycophants is that they are telegraphing harm to themselves,” she added.

Pressley said she wanted to “sound a wake-up call” about Project 2025, describing it as a “far-right manifesto” and a “1,000-page bucket list of extremist policies that would eradicate every institution of government and destroy every way of life for everyone who calls this country home.”

Pressley, a Massachusetts Democrat who has long fought to abolish the death penalty, criticized the group’s position on the death penalty.

“The Justice Department will keep killing,” she said. “The Justice Department will rush to apply the death penalty and extend it to even more people, bypassing due process protections.”

According to the Project 2025 document: I want “The next conservative government” will “take all possible measures to ensure the death row of the 44 currently federal death row inmates.”

Since the death penalty was reinstated in 1988, only 16 people have been executed by the federal government. Most executions are carried out under state death penalty statutes.

The Trump administration carried out 13 of its 16 executions in its final months in office.

In a statement to The Hill, Mr. Trump’s spokesman, Stephen Chan, refuted Mr. Pressley’s comments about Mr. Trump’s policies toward the Justice Department during the hearing, saying he “used such ridiculous language.” He called Mr. Presley a “dishonest” person.