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. (Read more: Breitbart, 1/10/2024) (Archive)