President-elect Donald Trump began his press conference on Tuesday with a lengthy attack on President Joe Biden and the ongoing court cases against him.
After claiming Biden and is team are making the transition difficult, Trump fumed about the recent offshore drilling restrictions put in place. “They took away 625 million acres of offshore drilling. Nobody else does that. And they think they have it, but we will put it back. I’m going to put it back on day one. I’m going to have it revoked on day one. We’ll go immediately if we need to. I don’t think we should have to go to the courts.”
“But if we do have to go to the courts, you know, they try to be sneaky. They go in and they say, I remember this is a man that said he wants the transition to be smooth. Well, you don’t do the kind of things you don’t have a judge working real hard to try and embarrass you because I did nothing wrong, by the way. I did nothing, absolutely nothing wrong. If I did something wrong, I wouldn’t be standing here right now because I’ve won all these cases,” Trump continued, pivoting to attack Special Counsel Jack Smith who investigated and indicted Trump in two separate cases:
Nobody’s ever won so many cases as I have against the Justice Department. I mean, Jack Smith had cases all over the place. People were being subpoenaed, lives were being ruined. They were spending everything they had– money. We were helping them out. We had to they were being they were subpoenaing people from that had no idea what they were even talking about. That’s a sick group of people. And it was all to influence the election.
It was all a fight against a political opponent. We’ve never had that in this country. We have had that in certain countries. We’ve had that in third-tier countries. We’ve had that in banana republics, but we’ve never had that in a place like the United States. I don’t even know if it’s been on a small level. I’m sure it has been on a small level, but this was the largest level ever. They brought this moron out of The Hague. He’s a mean guy. He’s a mean, nasty guy. His picture was perfect because you look at his picture, you say that’s a bad guy with his robe, his purple robe, and he executes people.
He shouldn’t be allowed to execute people because he will execute everybody! He’s a nut job. But we won all of those cases with him.
Notably, Smith’s work at the Hague did not lead to the death penalty for any of the war criminals related to the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo as the Netherlands does not have capital punishment. A CNN profile of Smith noted he did secure a conviction that led to a death sentence in New York for a gang member who killed two cops.
“As a prosecutor in Brooklyn, New York, one of Smith’s biggest and most high-profile cases was prosecuting gang member Ronell Wilson for the murder of two New York City police department detectives during an undercover gun operation in Staten Island. Wilson was convicted and sentenced to death, the first death penalty case in New York at the time in 50 years, though a judge later found he was ineligible for the death penalty,” reported CNN in 2022.
Trump continued his rant against the court system and turned his attention to Judge Aileen Cannon, who he appointed:
And I mean, I don’t know the judge in Florida, but we had a brilliant judge in Florida that saw right through it and we won the case. She was a brilliant judge with great courage. You know, the the left, as we call them, the radical left. They have a way. They play the ref and they play it very hard. They play the ref.
They go and say horrible things about judges and prosecutors. And some judges and prosecutors say, look, the only way I’m going to get these people off my back is to give victory to them. They’re playing the ref. I think it’s illegal what they do. It’s almost like talking. It’s worse than talking to a judge. But the judge in Florida, Judge Cannon and was brilliant and tough and she didn’t stand for it.
And I don’t know her and I never met her until the case. And I don’t believe I said even one word to her. But she was very, very strong and very, very brilliant. And her opinion was so brilliant that they dropped their appeal. They couldn’t beat the appeal. So that’s what we’re up against. So they say we’re going to have a smooth transition. All they do is talk. It’s all talk. Everything they do is talk. We’re going to have a smooth transition and then they take 625 million acres and they essentially land mark it. So you can’t ever drill there again and we’re going to be drilling soon.
