Presidents and prosecutors have for generations appeared in the Great Hall of the Justice Department to announce important anti-crime initiatives or to offer plaudits for the fundamental tenet of the rule of law, while maintaining distance from the detailed workings of the department itself.
When President Bill Clinton addressed the Great Hall in 1993, he used the occasion to discuss the crime bill he was trying to push through Congress. Eight years later, when President George W. Bush appeared there to dedicate the building in honor of former Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he declared that everyone who worked at the department did so to “serve the public in the cause of justice.”
But when President Trump appeared in the gilded room on Friday afternoon, he did something different: He delivered a grievance-filled attack on the very people who have worked in the building and others like them. As he singled out some targets of his rage, he appeared to offer his own vision of justice in America, one defined by personal vengeance rather than by institutional principles.
“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” Mr. Trump said. “They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third-world country, but in the end, the thugs failed and the truth won.”
Among those Mr. Trump lashed out at were Marc Elias, a Democratic lawyer who took the lead in fighting his attempts to challenge his loss in the 2020 election, and Mark F. Pomerantz, a prosecutor who worked on an early version of a criminal case against him in Manhattan; efforts in the case ultimately led to Mr. Trump’s conviction last year on dozens of state felony charges.
His anger rising, Mr. Trump went on to assail Mr. Pomerantz’s former boss, Alvin L. Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, and the former special counsel, Jack Smith, who had accused him in separate criminal indictments of illegally holding on to classified materials and of using lies and fraud to remain in office at the end of his last term in the White House.
Delving into the past, Mr. Trump also attacked James B. Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., who had opened an investigation into ties between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign. Mr. Trump announced to his audience at the Justice Department, where Mr. Comey worked for years, that he was proud to have gotten rid of him.
“It was a great honor for me to fire — I will tell you this, a great honor to fire James Comey, a great, great honor,” he said. “That was nothing. There was no better day.”
Mr. Trump identified other enemies in his speech, including Norm Eisen, a lawyer who oversaw the first impeachment accusing him of trying to strong-arm Ukraine into investigating Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the run-up to the 2020 election. Mr. Eisen has also played a central role in bringing civil cases against Mr. Trump challenging his efforts to expand presidential powers and slash the federal work force.
In an email on Saturday morning, Mr. Eisen said the president had complained multiple times in recent weeks after he had secured court victories against the administration by “protecting the Constitution and innocent Americans targeted by Trump’s abuses.”
“If Trump thinks we are going to slow down because of anything he says, he’s wrong,” Mr. Eisen wrote. “In fact, we take this as a backhanded acknowledgment of our success and we are going to redouble our efforts to defend the Constitution and the American people.”
In offering his litany of complaints, Mr. Trump provided no proof that Mr. Eisen or any of the others had committed crimes or even ethical violations. Their sole offense appeared to have been trying to hold him accountable for his behavior.
Mr. Trump used his remarks not only to go after his foes, but also to extol those he believed to be friends. He lavished praise, for instance, on Judge Aileen M. Cannon, the Florida jurist who dismissed his classified documents case last summer in a ruling that determined — against decades of precedent — that Mr. Smith had been unlawfully appointed to his job as special counsel.
“She was the absolute model of what a judge should be,” Mr. Trump declared. “And she was strong and tough.”
The charges dismissed by Judge Cannon — which were backed up by extensive evidence collected by Mr. Smith’s prosecutors and F.B.I. agents — were “bullshit,” Mr. Trump said, failing to note that the judge had thrown out the case not on the merits of the evidence but rather on the circumstances of Mr. Smith’s appointment.
Over more than an hour, Mr. Trump, relying on a series of twisted facts and misrepresentations, accused his adversaries both inside and outside the department of weaponizing the justice system against him.
The campaign-style address suggested that Mr. Trump would not soon let go of his anger at federal prosecutors and that he intended to make good on his longstanding vows to seek retaliation against them.
“We must be honest about the lies and abuses that have occurred within these walls,” he declared. “Unfortunately, in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and good will built up over generations.”
Mr. Trump detailed a list of the retributive actions he has already taken, including stripping security clearances from Mr. Smith and Mr. Bragg as well as firing senior officials of the F.B.I. who, as he put it, misdirected resources to “send SWAT teams after grandmothers and J6 hostages” — references to the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Hours later, the White House announced an executive order suspending the security clearances of people at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the law firm where Mr. Pomerantz was a partner before joining the Manhattan district attorney’s office about a decade later.
And in between tangential complaints about the news media and the safety of the New York City subway, he promised to do more to punish his adversaries, albeit in an unspecified way.
“We will expose and very much expose their egregious crimes and severe misconduct of which was levels you’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “It’s going to be legendary. It’s going to also be legendary for the people that are able to seek it out and bring justice. We will restore the scales of justice in America, and we will ensure that such abuses never happen again in our country.”
