CNN’s senior legal analyst, Elie Honig, blasted Donald Trump for ‘desecrating’ the halls of the Justice Department with a political speech on Friday.
Speaking at the Justice Department with the DOJ logo behind him, Trump labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged,” according to Politico.
Trump also said his political opponents belong in prison, claimed the Justice Department was weaponized against him and called media outlets “illegal.”
“What happened today, that speech was a desecration of the Justice Department, of the Great Hall of Justice, where it was given,” Honig said on CNN in a clip highlighted by Mediaite. “AGs and occasionally, presidents of both parties have used that room for decades to address the rank and file like I once was, to call on the highest principles of DOJ.”
“Now……we have Donald Trump calling prosecutors ‘Marxist,’ ‘scum,’ ‘savages, and ‘thugs,'” Honig added. “We have a five-minute speech on Bobby Knight and Indiana basketball. We have talk about the price of eggs and bacon. We have stuff about Hunter Biden’s laptop. We have a riff about Norm Eisen.. the claim that firefighters voted for him [Trump] by 94%. We have mentions of Al Capone, Wyatt Earp, Rudy Giuliani.”
“It was disgraceful,” Honig concluded.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Easkin (D-Md.) who served on the House select Committee that investigated the Jan. 6,2021 attack at the Capitol also criticized Trump’s speech.
“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,” Raskin said. “It was an absolute desecration of the culture and history of the Department of Justice.”
