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President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”
With the DOJ logo directly behind him, Trump called his political opponents lawbreakers and said others should be sent to prison.
“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” the president said in a rambling speech that lasted more than an hour.
While condemning officials who directed the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and repeating his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen, Trump said: “The people who did this to us should go to jail.”
In remarks that were by turns dark, exultant and pugnacious, Trump vowed to remake the Justice Department and retaliate against his enemies, some of whom he called “thugs.”
It was, even by Trump’s standards, a stunning show of disregard for decades of tradition observed by his predecessors, who worried about politicizing or appearing to exert too much control over the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Trump, instead, called himself the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and accused the DOJ’s prior leadership of doing “everything within their power to prevent” him from becoming the president.
Trump charged the DOJ with spying on his campaign, raiding his home, persecuting his “family, staff and supporters,” launching “one hoax and disinformation campaign after the other” and breaking the law “on a colossal scale,” making clear the glee he has taken in undermining the department’s typical independence and wielding it to achieve the White House’s objectives.
“First, we must be honest about the lies and the abuses that have occurred within these walls,” Trump said. “Unfortunately in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and goodwill built up over generations. They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”
Those days, Trump said, “are over, and they are never going to come back. He added that he would demand “full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.”
While any presidential visit to the Justice Department is a rarity, Trump repeatedly breached other norms in his remarks as he slammed former officials, unleashed attacks on private attorneys, and touted his vote tallies in last year’s election.
“It’s a campaign by the same scum you’ve been dealing with for years,” Trump said of the lawyers and officials who have targeted him. “We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. … We will restore the scales of justice in our country.”
The president sought to recast his fraught history with the department — most notably the two federal criminal cases he faced last year, one on charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the other for refusing to return a hoard of classified documents after he left office in 2021. Trump also bragged about revoking the security clearance of “deranged Jack Smith,” the special counsel who indicted him in those cases. (Smith and the Justice Department abandoned both cases after Trump won reelection last year.).
Trump boasted about pardoning hundreds of “political prisoners who have been grossly mistreated,” referring to the people convicted in connection with the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And he said “there was no better day” than when he fired James Comey, the president’s first-term FBI director who investigated the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.
“What they’ve ripped down is incalculable,” Trump said of the department’s leaders under the Biden administration.
Trump critics said his decision to come to the Justice Department to deliver such strident attacks was the real source of damage to the department’s traditions and its morale.
“No president has ever given a speech at the Department of Justice like that, where he railed against his political foes and summoned up an agenda for totally political, partisan prosecution,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) said. “It was an absolute desecration of the culture and history of the Department of Justice.”
Raskin also ridiculed Trump’s description of those charged in the Capitol riot as political prisoners. “He called the insurrectionists today political prisoners, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn or Nelson Mandela. What a joke,” the lawmaker said.
Trump also used his visit to offer an effusive tribute to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who issued a ruling that tossed out the classified documents case against him. Prosecutors were appealing that decision when Trump prevailed at the polls last November.
“The case against me was bullshit and she correctly dismissed it,” he said.
Noting that he had appointed her but did not know her personally, Trump praised Cannon as “brilliant” and credited her for standing her ground under withering criticism from the media and legal pundits. “She was very courageous and it only made her angry,” the president said. “They were hitting her so hard it was hard to watch. … She was the absolute model of what a judge should be.”
And he said the Supreme Court’s six conservative justices are treated “unbelievably badly” by Democrats opposing Trump’s agenda.
Attorney General Pam Bondi introduced Trump by pledging that she and others at the department are fully engaged in his mission.
“We will never stop fighting for him and for our country,” she said.
Before the president arrived, the audience heard from two other prominent Trump appointees at DOJ: Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel. Both did their best to fire up the crowd by declaring that DOJ is heeding Trump’s call to get tough on criminals and undocumented immigrants.
Despite Trump’s repeated and bitter denunciations of his critics, at times Friday he appeared to say that he does not intend to instruct his appointees how to target his opponents but instead plans to trust them to use their judgment to achieve his goals.
“I don’t do it. They do it,” the president said, adding later that he might not return to the department again during his presidency.
Toward the end of his speech, Trump quoted an unlikely source.
“Etched onto the walls of this building are the words English philosopher John Locke said: ‘Where law ends, tyranny begins,’” Trump said. “And I see that.”
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misidentified the people whom Trump said should go to prison.
