Trump gives political speech at a Justice Department shaken by firings and dropped cases

By Hannah Rabinowitz, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump assailed the “weaponization” of the justice system during a speech Friday inside the Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building, the storied building from which the government pursued criminal investigations and prosecutions against him.

Flanked by staunch allies he tapped to run the organizations he says attacked him relentlessly and unjustly, Trump, standing in the Justice Department’s great hall next to 180 kilos of fake fentanyl sitting underneath a box that said in capital letters, “DEA evidence,” described himself as the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and vowed to expel what he called “rogue actors and corrupt forces” from the government.

“I will insist upon and demand full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred,” Trump said.

Those alleged abuses included how investigators “spied on my campaign; 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.

The Trump White House is enmeshed in the daily decision-making at DOJ and FBI. Officials at the Justice Department and FBI Director Kash Patel have deferred to Trump and White House adviser Stephen Miller for strategy and messaging issues, sources previously told CNN, and Miller has regularly talked to the top officials in those departments.

Already, the Justice Department has been shaken by a series of firings, resignations and sidelining of senior-level officials and career prosecutors since Inauguration Day, including those who worked on the criminal cases against Trump or on Capitol riot prosecutions. In his first hours in office, Trump also issued broad pardons and commutations of people who were charged in the Capitol attack.

Trump has also installed allies to run the Justice Department and FBI, including Patel, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and his own personal lawyers Emil Bove, Todd Blanche and John Sauer.

Though there is precedent for speeches in front of the DOJ workforce, Trump’s visit is the first time that a president of the United States is delivering a political address inside the department since Barack Obama unveiled new guidance for intelligence-gathering in the wake of Edward Snowden’s disclosure of US surveillance programs in 2014.

During his first term, Trump kept his distance from the department because of the ongoing investigation into potential ties between his campaign and Russia. (Trump was never charged.) The president had, in 2017, sought to give an address at FBI headquarters but was talked out of the idea by advisers in the White House because of an uproar inside the bureau over his firing of James Comey.

Trump has since taken aim at the Justice Department and the FBI, lambasting the agencies over the cascading series of investigations into him, his allies, his campaigns, and his supporters, and promising from the campaign trail that he would use the department to go after his perceived enemies.

Joe Biden stayed away from the Justice Department – in part because of the then-ongoing investigation of his son. And Merrick Garland, Biden’s attorney general, limited his public interactions with the president, to try to show separation given the Hunter Biden and Trump investigations, which were then ongoing.

On Friday, Trump spoke from the same stage where, on the first anniversary of the pro-Trump mob attack on the US Capitol, Garland suggested that Trump could face criminal accountability for his role in instigating the 2021 Capitol riot. Garland, under pressure to address Trump’s role, tacitly acknowledged for the first time that Trump could face charges, saying only that DOJ is “committed to holding all January 6th perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law– whether they were present that day or were otherwise criminally responsible for the assault on our democracy.”

Trump was later indicted for his alleged role in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results, and the case was dropped once he was elected last November. He was also charged with improperly retaining classified documents, which was dismissed by a Florida judge in July; prosecutors dropped their appeal of that ruling after the election.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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