Former President Donald Trump threatened to weaponize his own DOJ in a reversal of complaints that Democrats are targeting him.
The former president suggested he could use the FBI and Justice Department to go after rivals if he wins the presidency in 2024. In an hour-long interview with the Spanish-language television network Univision that aired Thursday, Trump attacked President Joe Biden for weaponizing federal agencies in an attempt to halt his presidential campaign.
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“I think the people know it's a political persecution,” Trump told host Enrique Acevedo. “It's a political hoax. This is Biden who's the worst president in the history of our country. We've never had a president so dumb, so incompetent, and so corrupt, from the standpoint of what they're doing.”
“They've weaponized the Justice Department, they've weaponized the FBI, and they've come at me with the worst indictments. Nobody's ever seen anything like it."
Acevedo asked Trump if he would also weaponize those departments against his opponents if he was reelected.
“They’ve already done it,” Trump answered. "But if they want to follow through on this, yeah, it could certainly happen in reverse. They’ve released the genie out of the box.”
“When you’re president and you’ve done a good job and you’re popular, you don’t go after them so you can win an election. They’ve done indictments in order to win an election. They call it weaponization,” Trump said. “But yeah, they have done something that allows the next party, I mean if somebody, if I happen to be president and I see somebody who’s doing well and beating me very badly, I say go down and indict them, mostly they would be out of business. They’d be out. They’d be out of the election.”
Trump faces four separate criminal cases, including business fraud charges in New York, two federal ones over his handling of classified documents and his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, and a Georgia election interference case over efforts to thwart the state’s 2020 presidential election.
Trump is the first president to be charged with criminal activity and be indicted. Speaking on Univision, Trump said, “Nothing like this has ever happened in this country. It does happen in other countries. But these are developing nations. These are third world nations.”
“So Biden is a man who has unleashed something. That's a very bad thing because when that happens to me, it can happen to them."
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Earlier this month, the Washington Post reported that Trump and his allies were plotting how to use the government to go after his critics should he win a second term.
According to people who have spoken with Trump or are familiar with the case, the former president has told his advisers and friends that he will use the Justice Department to investigate a number of members from his previous administration, including former chief of staff John F. Kelly, former Attorney General William Barr, former attorney Ty Cobb, and former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley.