PALM BEACH, Florida — Former President Donald Trump, the 2024 GOP frontrunner for president, told Breitbart News exclusively that Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco is the person who is actually pulling the strings at the Department of Justice (DOJ), not Attorney General Merrick Garland.
While expanding on his earlier point about how Democrat President Joe Biden is “surrounded by vicious people,” Trump noted that Monaco seems to be the person really in charge at the Justice Department and that Garland is just a figurehead.
“Lisa Monaco, she’s really running the Justice Department, rather viciously and rather illegally, and that will be found out over the next year and a half, I predict,” Trump told Breitbart News in the more-than-two-hour-long exclusive interview at Mar-a-Lago in late December.
Trump said that Monaco is “very friendly with” Andrew Weissman, who served as general counsel at the FBI and later was a top official in then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump. Weissman is now in the private sector.
“Weissman is her boss,” Trump said. “Weissman suffers from major Trump Derangement Syndrome. All these guys do. They’ve been after me for seven years. They haven’t done well.”
Monaco served in now-former President Barack Obama’s White House for several years as a Homeland Security adviser to the president. She was particularly close with Susan Rice, who was Obama’s national security adviser and later joined the Biden White House as a domestic policy adviser. Rice has since left the Biden White House.
Several Republican sources both inside and outside Congress have long talked about how Monaco plays an outsized role as deputy attorney general overseeing the Department of Justice. One former congressman told Breitbart News that it will come out eventually that she is far more involved in much of the DOJ’s decisions than it appears.
Garland, a former appellate Judge whom Obama nominated as a Supreme Court justice candidate but Senate Republicans refused to confirm before the 2016 election, was later appointed by Biden as the attorney general. Garland’s time as the attorney general has been marred with controversy over politicization at the Department of Justice, particularly with his decision to allow the various investigations and prosecutions into Biden’s leading political opponent—Trump—to continue.
After the highly controversial FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago, Garland finally came out publicly in a rare statement to television cameras to say that he personally authorized it.
Monaco, for her part, has, as recently as just a couple weeks ago, defended the Justice Department public from Trump’s allegations of weaponization and politicization.
“Those claims bear no resemblance to the Justice Department that I know,” Monaco said in response to Trump in an interview with ABC News’s Pierre Thomas, published just before Christmas in 2023:
The Justice Department that I know is filled with dedicated men and women, investigators, lawyers, prosecutors, analysts, professional staff who get up every day, Pierre, they get up every day without regard to who’s in the White House or who’s in Congress.
Some leading congressional committees have also been investigating Monaco’s role inside the Justice Department and in this ongoing politicized nature of law enforcement. In 2023, House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) sought a congressional briefing from Monaco on findings that Special Counsel John Durham published about the FBI’s targeting of Trump during his presidency. Monaco’s role in things is more likely to become a more central focus of congressional investigation, as well, in the coming weeks and months as lawmakers uncover documents and testimony about her decision-making from the number two perch at the DOJ. Whether Garland is really in charge over there, too, could become a central focus of the 2024 presidential campaign, especially if Trump wins the GOP nomination, as most expect him to, and as he fends off charges from his opponent’s administration entering the 2024 general election.
