At DOJ, Trump anoints himself as the ‘chief law enforcement officer in our country’
President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”
With the DOJ logo directly behind him, Trump called for his legal tormentors to be sent to prison.
“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” the president said in a rambling speech that lasted more than an hour. “The people who did this to us should go to jail.”
In remarks that were by turns dark, exultant and pugnacious, Trump vowed to remake the agency and retaliate against his enemies.
It was, even by Trump’s standards, a stunning show of disregard for decades of tradition observed by his predecessors, who worried about politicizing or appearing to exert too much control over the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Trump, instead, called himself the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and accused the DOJ’s prior leadership of doing “everything within their power to prevent” him from becoming the president. [Continue reading…]