President Donald Trump will be visiting the Justice Department to garner support for his tough-on-crime agenda. This visit will also serve as a celebration after successfully overcoming two federal prosecutions that were dropped after his election victory last year.
“I’m going to set out my vision,” the Republican president said Thursday about the purpose for a visit the White House is billing as “historic.”
The choice of venue for the speech highlights Trump’s strong interest in the department and his intent to wield influence over it, especially after facing criminal investigations during his first term in office and reelection campaign. This visit, which marks the first time a president has visited the department in ten years, will take Trump right into the heart of an institution he has criticized harshly for years but has actively tried to alter by appointing loyalists and members of his personal legal team to key positions.
While it is not uncommon for presidents to address the Justice Department’s personnel from the Great Hall, Trump’s visit early into his second term is significant. This is mainly due to his unique background as a former defendant charged by the same agency he is now preparing to speak to. It is expected that his speech will involve grievances about his encounters with the criminal justice system, such as the FBI’s 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida for confidential documents.
Trump’s visit also comes at a time when Attorney General Pam Bondi has asserted that the department needs to be depoliticized even as critics assert agency leadership is injecting politics into the decision-making process.
“President Trump will visit the Department of Justice to give remarks on restoring law and order, removing violent criminals from our communities, and ending the weaponization of justice against Americans for their political leanings,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.
The relationship between presidents and Justice Department leaders has waxed and waned over the decades depending on the personalities of the officeholders and the sensitivity of the investigations that have dominated the day. The dynamic between President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and his attorney general, Merrick Garland, was known to be fraught in part because of special counsel investigations that Garland oversaw into Biden’s mishandling of classified information and into the firearms and tax affairs of his son Hunter.
When it comes to setting its agenda, the Justice Department historically takes a cue from the White House but looks to maintain its independence on individual criminal investigations.
Trump has upended such norms.
He encouraged specific investigations during his first term and tried to engineer the firing of Robert Mueller, the special counsel assigned to investigate ties between Russia and Trump’s 2016 campaign. He also endured difficult relationships with his first two handpicked attorneys general – Jeff Sessions was fired immediately after the 2018 midterm election, and William Barr resigned weeks after publicly disputing Trump’s bogus claims of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.
Arriving for a second term in January fresh off a landmark Supreme Court opinion that reaffirmed a president’s unshakable control of the Justice Department, Trump has appeared determined to clear from his path any potential obstacles, including by appointing Bondi – a former Florida attorney general who was part of Trump’s defense team at his first impeachment trial – and Kash Patel, another close ally, to serve as his FBI director.
At her January confirmation hearing, Bondi appeared to endorse Trump’s false claims of mass voter fraud in 2020 by refusing to answer directly whether Trump had lost to Biden. She also echoed his position that he had been unfairly “targeted” by the Justice Department despite the wealth of evidence prosecutors say they amassed. She regularly praises him in Fox News Channel appearances and proudly noted that she had removed portraits of Biden, Garland and Vice President Kamala Harris from a Justice Department wall upon arriving.
“We all adore Donald Trump, and we want to protect him and fight for his agenda. And the people of America overwhelmingly elected him for his agenda,” Bondi said in a recent Fox interview with Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump.
Even before Bondi had been confirmed, the Justice Department fired department employees who served on special counsel Jack Smith’s team, which charged Trump with plotting to overturn the 2020 election and with hoarding classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Both cases were dismissed last November in line with longstanding Justice Department policy against indicting sitting presidents.
Officials also demanded from the FBI lists of thousands of employees who worked on investigations into the Jan 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, when a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the building in an effort to halt the certification of the electoral vote, and fired prosecutors who had participated in the cases. And they’ve ordered the dismissal of a criminal case against New York Mayor Eric Adams by saying the charges had handicapped the Democrat’s ability to partner in the Republican administration’s fight against illegal immigration.
Leavitt is one of three administration officials who face a lawsuit from The Associated Press on First and Fifth Amendment grounds. The AP says the three are punishing the news agency for editorial decisions they oppose. The White House says the AP is not following an executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
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