President Donald Trump urged a Department of Justice crowd to launch investigations into Democrats, prominent nonprofits filing lawsuits against his administration and multiple news organizations.
Speaking in the main hall of the Robert F. Kennedy Friday, Trump claimed his 2024 election victory had “given us a mandate” for “a far reaching investigation … into the corruption of our system” by Democrats and vowed to “expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government” and “expose their egregious crimes and severe misconduct.”
“It’s going to be legendary,” he said in a rare speech by a president at the department.
Almost immediately after beginning his speech, Trump leveled an attack on America’s courts for having allowed prosecutors to charge him with multiple crimes committed during and after his first term. He praised his two former defense attorneys who now serve in high ranking roles in the department, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, for having had to work “under some of the most corrupt judges” as they labored to keep him from facing any consequences for multiple felonies he was charged with by two federal grand juries and state grand juries in Georgia and New York.
“They never they were not shy, they fought. They weren’t afraid, and they were brilliant,” he said.
Trump also claimed that the department had allowed “a corrupt group of hacks within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and goodwill built up over generations” by having “weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people” during criminal investigations into him.
But Trump told the audience of political appointees and supporters that those sorts of investigations, which he called “abuses,” would “never happen again.”
“They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third world country. But in the end, the thugs failed and the truth won,” he said.
Since winning the 2024 election, Trump and his aides have moved quickly to stock the DOJ’s top ranks with loyalists without regard to qualification and have effectively sidelined anyone who played a role in the failed prosecutions of the president or the sweeping investigation into the 2021 riot Trump fomented at the U.S. Capitol in a last-ditch attempt to remain in office following his loss to Joe Biden in 2020.
His remarks, delivered in the department’s cavernous great hall, came following an introduction by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who described Trump as “the greatest president in the history of our country” and said she and the rest of her department were “proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.”
Bondi’s statement represented a break from decades of work by attorneys general under both parties to make clear that the Department of Justice is independent from the White House and does not operate based on political considerations.
But Trump, who described himself — not Bondi — as “the chief law enforcement officer in our country,” has been intent on erasing any such niceties about the nation’s law enforcement apparatus as he has sought to implement what he has described as “retribution” against the Democratic Party and the “deep state” of nonpartisan civil servants who staff the justice system.
While he attacked most of the judges who’d presided over the felony cases brought against him as “corrupt,” he singled out for praise Aileen Cannon, the Florida federal judge who he’d appointed just before leaving office, for having dismissed the charges he’d faced for having allegedly unlawfully retained national defense information at his Florida home after leaving the presidency in 2021.
He said Cannon had not reacted to criticism from Democrats and accused other judges who have ruled against him and his administration of bowing to public pressure to deliver negative rulings in cases involving him or his policies.
“It’s very sad what they do to the Supreme Court and all of a lot of the judges that I had, if you look at them, they take tremendous abuse in the New York Times and The Washington Post, all of the different networks. They take such abuse. And honestly, they’re very simply, they’re afraid of bad publicity. They don’t want bad publicity. And it’s truly interference in my opinion, and it should be illegal, and it probably is illegal in some form,” he said.
“It’s a campaign, and it’s by the same scum that you have been dealing with for years, like guys like Andrew Weissman, deranged Jack Smith. There’s a guy named Norm Eisen. I don’t even know what he looks like. His name is Norm Eisen of [Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility ]. He’s been after me for nine years now. CREW is a charitable organization and and the reason I’m saying this … is I’m only going to get one chance to say this, but these are bad people.”
Trump called for the department to crack down on Eisen as well as other groups bringing lawsuits against him – while taking another shot at the media.
“They’re not legitimate people. They’re horrible people, they’re scum. And you have to know that … And I believe that CNN and [MSNBC] who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they’re really corrupt and they’re illegal. What they do is illegal,” he said.
He continued attacking the country’s free press, telling the audience of prosecutors that “these networks and these newspapers” were “really no different than a highly paid political operative.”
“It has to stop. It has to be illegal. It’s influencing law … and it just cannot be legal — I don’t believe it’s legal, and they do it in total coordination with each other.”
