‘A Desecration of the Justice Department’: Elie Honig Hammers ‘Disgraceful’ Trump Speech
Former federal prosecutor Elie Honig did not pull any punches when weighing in on President Donald Trump’s speech at the Department of Justice on Friday.
Trump gave a whirlwind, rambling speech to DOJ employees at an event that was supposed to be about fentanyl trafficking. However, the president spent much of his address rehashing old grievances against his political opponents and the DOJ under the Biden administration. He claimed the department had been weaponized against him in the form of his prosecutions for trying to overturn the 2020 election and his retention of government documents after leaving office in 2021.
The president also lashed out at the media and singled out several organizations for doing “totally illegal” reporting.
Hours later, Honig, CNN’s senior legal analyst, joined AC360 and told viewers how he really felt after Anderson Cooper asked, “Have you ever seen something like this?”
Honig answered:
No, Anderson. What happened today, that speech was a desecration of the Justice Department, of the Great Hall of Justice, where it was given. 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.
The person who that building is named after is Robert F. Kennedy. Senior, to be clear. And just to give a sense of the type of speech that ordinarily gets given by an AG to prosecutors, I pulled this. I just want to read real quick how RFK ended a speech he gave in 1962 when he was AG.
He said to the group, “In closing, let me tell you how important I think your work is to the future of our country. History knows no inevitability except as men surrender to their own fears of the future. I salute you and I wish you well in your work.”
Now, today, by contrast, we have Donald Trump calling prosecutors “Marxist,” “scum,” “savages,” and “thugs.” 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. Why? I have no idea. We have the fact that firefighters– the “fact,” probably not a fact, but the claim that firefighters voted for him by 94%. We have mentions of Al Capone, Wyatt Earp, Rudy Giuliani.
And then it ends with, I actually thought I was hearing something wrong. Y.M.C.A., that song. They played it, and he danced to it on the stage of the Great Hall. It was disgraceful.
In his speech, Trump discussed the aforementioned late Bobby Knight and his penchant for working the referees.
“Bobby Knight would play the ref,” the president said. “He would play the ref. He’d scream at the ref. He would scream so hard. Oh boy, it was terrible, actually. And the people would come up, his assistant coaches would come up, ‘Coach don’t do that.’”
Watch above via CNN.
