Pressed to Prosecute 'the Trump Regime and Its Collaborators,' Slotkin Says 'I'm With You.' She Has a List for 'Every Committee'

Sen. Elissa Slotkin says Democrats have already picked the cases they plan to bring against President Donald Trump's people. She just didn't know she was saying it on camera.

The Michigan Democrat was campaigning Thursday for congressional candidate Sean McCann when a stranger walked up with a request. "I'm worried that we're going to be too nice," the person said. "What are we going to do to hold the Trump regime and its collaborators responsible? I'm talking prosecutions."

"I'm with you," Slotkin answered.

Townhall obtained the hidden-camera video and posted it Friday. It has been viewed more than 900,000 times on X.

"In every committee"

Here is the heart of it, in her own words: "So basically, assuming we win both houses, even if we just win one, we'll come up... we have a list of, like, the 'signature cases.' So the things where it's, like, so egregious, such a violation of law, such a corruption case, like... and we will have, in every committee, there will be the 'signature cases' that we... where we hold people accountable."

Then she named targets. The ballroom project in the East Wing of the White House. The reflecting pool renovation on the National Mall. And "$200 million in, you know, from the Defense Department."

Her closing line was a schedule: "So that's what you'll see basically in January." That's when a new Congress is sworn in.

Think of a team that walks into the draft with its picks already circled. The games haven't been played, but the board is set. Slotkin is telling you the board is set, and the voting hasn't even ended.

The Budapest playbook

Slotkin also told the stranger where the idea came from. "I just went to Hungary. I went over to Budapest in Hungary because they just got rid of their authoritarian leader after 16 years," she said. "And I'm like, how did you handle 16 years of corruption? We don't have that much, but we have so much."

"And they did this 'signature cases' (strategy)," she said, according to Townhall's transcript. The picks, she explained, are the ones "that people identify with."

In other words, a sitting U.S. senator went abroad to study how a new government goes after the old one, and came home with a plan for Trump's team.

Not a slip. The third time.

This is not new language for Slotkin. It's the third time in a month she has laid out the same plan.

On Sept. 30, the text of her speech at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, posted by her own Senate office, called for "a list of 'signature cases'" and named three Trump officials: Kristi Noem, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro.

On Oct. 13, at the University of Chicago, she said it out loud. "I want to look at these signature cases and not just focus on the president, but on the people who enabled him," she said in video posted by The Chicago Thinker. She added that she wanted young graduates to see a Trump job as "buying myself a ton of problems."

When that clip blew up, Slotkin called the backlash "manufactured outrage" and said she only meant people who break the law. Her written reply on X told anyone looking to work for Trump that the Supreme Court's immunity ruling doesn't cover "those who do illegal things at his behest."

The new video has no such hedging. The stranger asked about prosecuting "collaborators." Slotkin didn't push back on the word. She said, "I'm with you."

What Congress can and can't do

Congress can't charge anyone with a crime. Prosecutions belong to the Justice Department. What committees can do is subpoena, hold hearings and send criminal referrals. That's the machinery Slotkin is describing when she promises a signature case "in every committee."

Slotkin has not addressed the video. On Friday, the day it posted, she was still cheering McCann on X: "When Democrats compete, they win... winning is step one." Townhall noted that its camera stamped the wrong date on the footage, and that it was shot Thursday, Oct. 29.

Election Day is Tuesday. Slotkin has now told a think tank, a campus crowd and a stranger with a hidden camera what comes after it. Voters can take her at her word.