President-elect Donald J. Trump said on Thursday that he would name Todd Blanche, who oversaw his legal defense against multiple indictments, to become the No. 2 official at the Justice Department.
The selection of Mr. Blanche, a former supervising federal prosecutor in Manhattan, as the deputy attorney general at the Justice Department serves as a pointed rebuke to the criminal cases against him. A day earlier, Mr. Trump selected Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and a caustic critic of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department, to become attorney general.
Mr. Blanche was Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer at his trial in New York state court this year, which ended in the former president being convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records, over a 2016 hush money payment to a porn star.
Mr. Blanche forged a unique connection to the president-elect this year, having defended him at trial. For weeks inside a Manhattan criminal courthouse, Mr. Trump and Mr. Blanche sat inches apart, often whispering to each other during long days of legal arguments and testimony.
In defending Mr. Trump, Mr. Blanche assembled a legal team that had to fight simultaneously on multiple legal fronts, all amid the pressure of a presidential campaign. Mr. Blanche, 50, left a prestigious law firm to represent Mr. Trump, a client whom few major firms were willing to represent.
That gamble now appears to have paid off handsomely for Mr. Blanche. The defense strategy for all of the indictments against Mr. Trump could be boiled down to one word: delay. And in most of the cases it worked, if not exactly how he and his team initially envisioned.
Along the way, Mr. Blanche often faced blistering criticism from judges who disliked Trump’s legal arguments, or the candidate’s bombast outside the courtroom.
As a young prosecutor, Mr. Blanche handled violent crimes cases in Manhattan federal court, eventually becoming a supervisor in that work. After leaving the prosecutor’s office, he became a private practice defense lawyer.
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