Trump To Make Rare Visit To Main Justice Amid Interference Concerns

President Donald Trump will speak at the Justice Department on Friday, amid ongoing concerns that he has compromised the agency’s traditional arms-length relationship with the White House.

While not unprecedented, it is highly unusual for a president to visit the Justice Department in person. Trump had repeatedly criticized the department during his campaign, calling prosecutions against him and his associates partisan, while vowing retribution.

Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday, Trump praised Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and incoming Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino, and said he’ll use Friday’s speech to “set out” his vision for the DOJ.

“It’s going to be their vision, really, but it’s my ideas,” Trump said. “Basically, we don’t want to have crime in the streets … we want to have justice, and we want safety in our cities, as well as our communities. We’ll be talking about immigration. We’ll be talking about a lot of things. It’s a complete gamut.”

The speech comes as Trump has vowed to remake the DOJ in his vision during his second term, fueled by anger about its two unprecedented criminal prosecutions against him. Leadership at the DOJ moved quickly to make a number of changes at the department once Trump took office, pardoning Jan. 6 rioters, halting litigation by the Justice’s Civil Rights Division and firing more than a dozen attorneys who worked for special counsel Jack Smith. The Justice Department also moved to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams last month, leaving the department in crisis and spurring accusations that the DOJ abandoned the case in exchange for support for the president’s immigration enforcement agenda.

The swirl of politically charged decisions that the Justice Department is regularly involved in is one reason many presidents shy away from visiting. It appears unlikely Trump will adhere to the hands-off stance most presidents have taken toward the DOJ to avoid allegations of politicizing the department. His appointees have said they intend to maintain policies limiting contacts between White House officials and DOJ, but those policies don’t apply to the president himself. And top Trump officials refused to say they would defy a presidential order to open a specific investigation.

Presidents do sometimes go on the road with their attorneys general to put the spotlight on crime-fighting efforts, but the rare presidential visits to Justice Department headquarters tend to be ceremonial or celebratory in nature. The last known public appearance by a president at DOJ came a decade ago, when President Barack Obama visited to pay tribute to Attorney General Eric Holder on his last day.

President George W. Bush visited in November 2001, formally dedicating the building colloquially known as Main Justice in the name of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Bush’s visit came just weeks after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, but he made no direct reference to the massive, ongoing criminal investigation into those events, perhaps out of fear of tainting it through official presidential comments.

A visit during Trump’s first term seemed almost out of the question due to the extreme tension between the White House and the Justice Department. From the administration’s early weeks, Trump resented Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ decision to recuse himself from Trump campaign-related matters, leading to the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. Trump and Sessions rarely spoke before the president fired him in 2018.

Trump’s relationship with Attorney General William Barr was less rocky at the outset, but soured toward the end of Trump’s term, particularly when Barr refused to back Trump’s false claim of widespread fraud in the 2020 election. The disagreement led Barr to resign in December of that year. That was followed by even more drama as Trump considered firing acting Attorney General Jeff Rosen because he also wouldn’t go along with Trump’s assertions of fraud. Rosen’s dismissal was headed off only after almost all DOJ’s senior leadership threatened to resign if Rosen was fired.