House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) on Wednesday defended his decision to attend Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan on Tuesday.
Johnson was asked a question about the Department of Justice and the House Ethics Committee’s investigation of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) at a House Republican Conference “Police Week” press conference, to which he replied, “I haven’t paid any attention to that at all. I can tell you that the Department of Justice has clearly been politicized. Some of us consider this actually to be a weaponized DOJ, and Merrick Garland is in charge. He is the attorney general at the top.”
“I think that they have used our system of justice against political opponents, of course, the most prominent of which is Donald J. Trump,” the Speaker continued. “I was with him yesterday in Manhattan, and many in the press have asked, why did you go there? Because I’m a former litigator. I’m an attorney. This is an egregious violation, a travesty of justice. They are using the judicial system for political purposes.”
“This is something the framers warned us against,” Johnson added.
Trump is charged with 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in New York as part of a hush money scheme to bury stories of alleged extramarital affairs that he feared could hurt his presidential campaign in 2016.
