President Trump visited the Justice Department on Friday for an astonishing victory seven weeks after his victory return to the White House.
Trump has accused the department under his predecessor of unfairly targeting him when it involves dozens of serious criminal charges. However, his visit visually solidified Trump's grip against the Justice Department amid fears from critics that he might try to reduce agency independence and promote prosecution of his perceived enemy.
“First, we have to be honest about the lies and abuses that have occurred within these walls. Unfortunately, in recent years, corrupt groups of hacking and extremists within the US government's ranks have eliminated the building of trust and goodwill for generations. They have used the vast power of our intelligence reporting agencies and law enforcement as a weapon to stop the will of the American people,” Trump told those gathered at department headquarters.
“They spyed on my campaigns, started surgeries on hoaxes and disformation one after another, broke the law on a huge scale, persecuting my family, staff and supporters, storming my home, Mar Lago, and did everything in their power to prevent me from becoming President of the United States.”
Past presidents have limited interactions with the Attorney General and visits to department headquarters are rare.
In many ways, the event reflects a Trump campaign event. When a similar playlist played while the audience was waiting for the president, when Trump arrived, he boasted of the size of the crowd gathered in the large hall of the building. When the speech was finished, “YMCA” was played and he briefly gave his signature dance on stage.
And like the trajectory of the campaign, Trump opposed the prosecution against him, including two people led by the DOJ. Cases related to his role in preventing the peaceful transfer of power and alleged spying related to his retention of his classification documents were both dismissed after his November victory.
“Now, as the highest law enforcement officer in our country, I assert and demand complete and complete accountability for the mistakes and abuses that have occurred,” Trump said.
“We expel fraudsters and corrupt forces from the government, exposing their terrible crimes and harsh fraud. [at] At a level you've never seen anything like that. It will be legendary. It will also become legendary to those who can seek it and bring justice. We restore the scale of American justice and ensure that such abuse will never happen again in our country. ”
Trump accused the Justice Department of joining the “radical” and trying to defeat him.
“They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and a third world country,” Trump said. “They may not be the vicious betrayal of American values than using the law to terrorize innocents and reward the evil ones. And that's exactly what you saw with Joe Biden, Merrick Garland and their peers, building the buildings of the past four years. They tore, what they tore apart is immeasurable.”
Trump has introduced a team of DOJ's loyalists and acknowledged that he has long-standing relationships with long-standing officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondy, the senior adviser to Trump's first bullet each defense team and who tackled legal challenges after the defeat of the 2020 campaign.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, one of Trump's criminal defense lawyers, was in attendance, as was Trump's new FBI director, Kash Patel, who was a fierce advocate for the president. Another Trump defense attorney, Emil Bove, was praised by the president for his current position at the top of the DOJ.
In the weeks since Trump's new team was assembled, they oversaw the fire of many senior career leaders, including many prosecutors and investigators who worked on two Trump criminal cases, and oversee those who worked on the January 6 case involving the insurrectionists.
He also called for Michael Flynn, a national security adviser in Trump's first term and resigned after lying to the vice president, who was also in Great Hall for his speech.
The president spoke multiple times about former President Biden and his family, focusing mainly on controversies related to Hunter Biden and his laptop. Trump also attacked the mental fitness of his predecessor.
He said that “Hunter Biden's laptop from hell” was not from Russia, but “still from his bedroom,” and that what he claimed was that he had gathered against the former Justice Department because he worked to prevent him from returning to the White House.
Trump also touted that his team “caused intelligence reporting security clearance, who lied about Hunter Biden's laptop from Hell, and former DOJ special advisor Jack Smith, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and New York State Attorney General Letitia James, who led to the case against Trump. He also praised Biden and his family for ending security clearances.
He kept checking out other people he thought had unfairly targeted him.
He referenced Norm Eisen, a Democrat lawyer in Trump's first bullet each. Through his legal groups, he has filed numerous lawsuits that challenged Trump's policies and staff layoffs. “He's been chasing me for nine years,” Trump said, “These are bad people. I don't know who he is. I don't know what he looks like.”
“His only life is getting Donald Trump, he's vicious and violent, he's trying, and he's probably been pretty successful over the years. But with me, what did he do? Do you think I'm the president? Are you here because I'm the president?” he said with a chuckle at Eisen for targeting him.
He also argued that they were affecting judges, and that the media was working without evidence and working with political campaigns that are not permitted in the news industry.
“These networks and these newspapers are really no different to high paying political operatives. And it has to stop, it has to be illegal, it has to be impacted by the judges, and it's really, yeah, it's about changing the law, it's just not legal. I don't think it's legal, they do it completely with each other,” he said.
The White House has been targeting the media in recent weeks, and last month announced it would take over the press pool surrounding the president, and announced it was in a continuous fight over the outlet's decision not to fully adopt the name “American Gulf” in place of the Gulf of Mexico into a widely influential stylebook used by US news media organizations.
He further argued that without evidence, Biden claimed to have signed an executive order with an “auto-pen.”
“We don't use an autopen. Number one, that's rude to the office. Second, who's got him to sign, so maybe it's not even invalid? He didn't know what he was doing. If that were the case, all of these bad things wouldn't have happened now,” Trump said.
Trump also targeted Washington, D.C., saying Mayor Muriel Bowser is doing a “good job” to “clean” the city, but warned that the federal government would take over if she didn't continue her work.
“We're going to have crime-free capital again. It's going to be cleaner, better and safer than ever, and it won't take us too long,” Trump said.
The president admitted at the end of his remarks that he questioned whether it was appropriate for him to give a speech of that nature at the DOJ, but said that was important.
“I was asked to do it and I said, 'Is it appropriate to do it?” And I think it's not only appropriate, but really important,” he said. “And I will never do it again because this is what I leave behind the biggest people I know, the best people, the smartest people, the toughest people I know.
