White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was widely mocked after she accidentally told the truth about the goal of President Donald Trump's Department of Justice (DOJ).
Her Freudian slip occurred during Monday’s White House press briefing when she declared the following:
"We want to restore the Department of Justice to an institution that focuses on fighting law and order and crime and putting real criminals behind bars, not targeting Americans because of their religion or political speech."
"We saw that under the previous administration and it's unacceptable to this president."
You can hear what she said in the video below.
Leavitt clearly made a mistake when she confidently declared that the DOJ under Trump would focus on “fighting law and order” instead of “fighting for law and order.”
And as people pointed out, she really—whether she meant to or not—said all that needed to be said about the Trump administration.
Leavitt's remarks came after she was criticized after she claimed a judge's ruling blocking Trump's deportation of migrants had "no lawful basis."
The Trump administration was already gearing up for a legal battle over the Alien Enemies Act after Trump invoked it on Saturday, clearing the way for him to deport over 250 undocumented immigrants purportedly from Venezuela with little to no due process.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 has been invoked only three times in U.S. history—during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II—granting the president extraordinary authority to detain or deport foreign nationals once the U.S. is formally at war. The law was last used to justify the internment of Japanese-American civilians during World War II.
U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg issued an order on Saturday to block the deportations, but DOJ attorneys informed him that two planes had already departed—one bound for El Salvador and the other for Honduras. Boasberg verbally instructed that the planes be turned around, but the directive was not followed.
Trump was later criticized for referring to Boasberg as "troublemaker and agitator" and calling for his impeachment.
Keith Pedersen/Facebook
