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Friday, March 14, 2025
Trump visits Justice Department for speech that breaks all norms (Perry Stein, Jeremy Roebuck and Derek Hawkins, WaPo, March 14, 2025)
The building that houses the Department that calls itself "Justice" is named in honor of the late Senator Robert Francis Kennedy. DJT's speech there on March 14, 2025 dishonored RFK's memory, and the legacy of honorable lawyers, FBI agents and other professionals who served our country without fear or favor. From The Washington Post:
Trump visits Justice Department for speech that breaks all norms
Donald Trump railed against the federal prosecutions he once faced during a rare presidential visit to the Justice Department.
6 min
President Donald Trump speaks during his visit Friday to Justice Department. (Nathan Howard/Reuters)
President Donald Trump delivered an unusual,campaign-style speech at Justice Department headquarters Friday, heavy with grievance and meandering from such topics as Al Capone to allegations of judicial corruption as he defied the distance that has traditionally existed between the White House and the federal law enforcement agency.
The president laid out his tough-on-crime vision, which includes mass deportations and prosecuting cartels to remove fentanyl from American streets. He repeated a hallmark mantra of his 2024 presidential campaign, vowing to end what he called the weaponization of the Justice Department.
But the speech — billed as one focused on law and order — was also sprinkled with tangents and misleading claims about immigration and crime in this country. Trump declared that he would keep FBI headquarters in downtown Washington instead of relocating it to a not-yet-constructed campus in suburban Maryland, a plan that has been in the works for decades and won final approval in 2023.
Standing in the Great Hall of the Justice Department, Trump spent much of his hour at the microphone laying out personal complaints about how “a corrupt group of hacks and radicals” wrongly prosecuted him during the Biden administration.
Trump mentioned the stymied federal cases against him repeatedly throughout the speech. At one point, he commended the Florida judge who dismissed the indictment accusing him of mishandling classified materials after he left the White House in 2021 and obstructing officials’ efforts to retrieve them — calling the entire indictment “bull---.”
That provocative line drew heavy applause from the crowd, which included elected officials, political appointees, allies and law enforcement officials.
Trump denounced the judges who oversaw his three other cases, including the state trial in New York where he was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records related to a hush money payment.
“It’s not even imaginable how corrupt they were,” he said.
The president made no major policy announcement in the speech, though he said his administration would soon begin a concerted campaign to combat fentanyl deaths, which have declined sharply in the past year after reaching record highs. He also touted his poll numbers, discussed rising egg prices, exaggerated his winning margin in the 2024 election and made discursive references to the famed basketball coach Bob Knight.
He appeared to suggest that the lawyers who challenged him in court were actually bad lawyers who were winning only because they knew how to play the judges — just like Knight played the referees on the basketball court.
“They … launched one hoax and disinformation operation after another, broke the law on a colossal scale, persecuted my family, staff and supporters, raided my home, Mar-a-Lago, and did everything within their power to prevent me from becoming the president of the United States,” Trump said.
It is rare for a president to visit the Justice Department — which has kept safeguards between the White House and the law enforcement agency in the post-Watergate era to ensure that politics don’t interfere with law enforcement investigations.
But Trump has obliterated those norms in his first two months as president. He chose lawyers who represented him in his criminal trials, Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, to serve in top positions at the Justice Department, and tapped Pam Bondi, who defended Trump during his first impeachment, as attorney general.
Trump thanked Bondi, Blanche and Bove, all of whom attended the speech, for their service and said Blanche and Bove “weren’t afraid, and they were brilliant” as his defense attorneys.
Trump kept a greater distance from the Justice Department during his first presidential term, never visiting headquarters for a public event. In 2015, President Barack Obama made a rare visit to participate in a farewell ceremony for Eric Holder, his attorney general.
Since Trump returned to the White House, his appointees at Justice have pushed out longtime career staffers who they accused of potentially undermining Trump’s agenda, outright firing some and transferring others to less desirable jobs.
They fired the attorneys who worked on the special counsel team that prosecuted Trump. And they have redirected resources across the department to focus on deportations and enforcing immigration laws.
Friday’s speech was fashioned like a Trump political rally, with many of the president’s staunch allies in the crowd. He gave a shout-out to supporters including his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was also investigated by the Justice Department and pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.
Flynn sought to withdraw that plea, but Trump pardoned him in 2020 before the case was resolved.
There’s a man who went through hell,” Trump said Friday of Flynn. “He shouldn’t have. … He’s a patriot.”
FBI Director Kash Patel, Bondi and Blanche, the deputy attorney general, served as the warm-up acts, each delivering brief remarks.
“We are going to fight to keep America safe again. President Trump has prioritized tackling our nation’s fentanyl crisis, and he has taken decisive action to fight it,” Bondi said. “Get the drugs off our street, get the gangs off our street, and get the illegal aliens out of our country.”
FBI Director Kash Patel talks to lawyer Emil Bove during Trump's visit to the Justice Department. (Nathan Howard/Reuters)
The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee blasted Trump’s speech as a “grim landmark in the spreading authoritarianism of this administration.” Speaking outside Justice Department headquarters, Rep. Jamie Raskin (Maryland) accused Trump of politicizing the department and violating the boundary between independent law enforcement and presidential power.
“The speech we just witnessed is a desecration of the essential values of the storied department in every way,” said Raskin, flanked by career prosecutors who said they had either been fired by Trump appointees or left the department in protest. “It’s an insult to the thousands of professional lawyers who go to work in the Department of Justice every day to enforce the rule of law, not the personal vendettas and partisan games of a politician.”
Trump, too, acknowledged the rarity of the whole event. He said he initially questioned whether it was appropriate for the president to deliver a speech at the Justice Department.
But Trump decided to go, though he said he was unsure when he would return.
“It’s not only appropriate,” Trump said. “I think it’s really important.”
The Village People’s “YMCA” blared as he walked off the stage.
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