The president says he would demand ‘full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that occurred.’
President Donald Trump gave a wide-ranging speech at the Department of Justice on March 14, denouncing what he described as “weaponization” by the previous administration and vowing to beef up the nation’s law enforcement.
“Our predecessors turned this Department of Justice into the Department of Injustice,” he said. “But I stand before you today to declare that those days are over and they are never going to come back.” He said that he would demand “full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that occurred.”
Trump’s speech came roughly two months into a presidency that has already seen reforms on multiple fronts—including actions targeting both the intelligence and law enforcement communities. For example, Trump noted how he revoked clearances for former intelligence officials who signed onto a letter attempting to discredit reporting about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
The second Trump administration has been hit with more than 90 lawsuits across the country with a long list of judges issuing orders halting its activities. On March 13, the administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene in one of those cases and criticized judges’ use of nationwide injunctions.
During his speech, Trump also reiterated his call for the attorney general to seek the death penalty for anyone who murders a police officer and suggested the death penalty should also be applied to drug traffickers.
“Various places have the death penalty,” he said. “Wherever you have the death penalty, you don’t have drugs, but I just don’t know if this country is ready for it.”
Trump paused to let Anne Funder, who lost her son to an accidental fentanyl overdose, speak. She described Trump’s election as the “best thing that we could do to keep America safe again.”
The Justice Department under the Biden administration was pursuing Trump months beforehand as part of former special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutions, which Trump alleged to be a weaponization of the department against political opponents.
Upon returning to the White House, Trump has chosen his own former attorneys to serve in key positions within the department. Attorney General Pam Bondi, who introduced him before his speech, advised him during the 2020 presidential election.
Trump also said he fired U.S. attorneys appointed by President Joe Biden that are “radical left” and “pro-crime.”
Emil Bove, one of his criminal defense attorneys, is serving as his principal associate deputy attorney general while Todd Blanche, who led his defense in his New York criminal trial, is serving as deputy attorney general at the department. Trump also appointed one of the officials from his first administration, Kash Patel, to serve as FBI director.
Trump said firing FBI Director James Comey in 2017 was “a great honor for me.” He added that he would stop construction of the FBI headquarters in Maryland and instead keep it in Washington.
“We’re going to build another big FBI building right where it is, which would have been the right place, because the FBI and the DOJ have to be near each other,” he said. He added that the DOJ and FBI previously “worked together for bad purposes” against him.
Trump’s two federal cases were eventually dismissed upon request by Smith after Trump won the 2024 presidential election. One of those cases was dismissed at the district court level by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who held that the appointment of Smith as special counsel violated the Constitution.
Cannon, Trump said, “was the absolute model of what a judge should be.” He went on to denounce criticism against judges like Cannon—something he alleged as playing “the ref.”