In recent years, Todd Blanche has been the lawyer President Trump has turned to, over and over, in his times of need.
It was Mr. Blanche who defended Mr. Trump in three of the four criminal cases he was facing, losing one to the Manhattan district attorney’s office but effectively winning two against the special counsel Jack Smith.
It was Mr. Blanche who took the No. 2 position at the Justice Department, stepping in as deputy attorney general to run the agency day to day, when Mr. Trump was re-elected.
And now it is Mr. Blanche whom the president has called upon again — this time in another moment of turmoil to serve as the interim attorney general after the abrupt firing of his predecessor, Pam Bondi.
Mr. Blanche, 51, brings a mixed record to the job. He has spent the past year or so enabling the wholesale politicization of the Justice Department and losing the trust of many federal judges while still serving as a last-ditch bulwark against the president’s most extreme attempts to seek vengeance against his enemies.
He has overseen the destruction of the department’s traditional norms of independence from the White House, often treating Mr. Trump not as a chief executive who could benefit from his legal advice but rather as a loudmouthed client whose orders must be followed.
At the same time, he has on occasion shown himself to be loyal to his roots as a former federal prosecutor trained in the Southern District of New York and has held off some of the president’s most impulsive efforts to open criminal cases unsupported by the evidence.
While it remains unclear how long Mr. Blanche will remain in his new job, whoever ends up replacing him — if, indeed, he is replaced — will step into a department that he has shaped in his own image. More than most Justice Departments, where the center of power typically resides in the attorney general’s office, this Justice Department has been largely guided by Mr. Blanche’s office.
His allies and acolytes are everywhere and wield outsize power.
Aakash Singh, one of his most senior aides, has assumed the role of communicating orders to — and setting priorities for — the 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices across the nation. Another top aide, Colin McDonald, was recently put in charge of a high-profile effort to crack down on fraud working with Vice President JD Vance.
D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, worked with Mr. Blanche as a private appellate lawyer defending Mr. Trump. So did Stanley E. Woodward Jr., the associate attorney general who oversees civil matters at the department.
It is hard to imagine any successor replicating the close relationship Mr. Blanche forged with Mr. Trump while defending him in the courtroom. That includes Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose name was floated for the job this week.
Even after Mr. Trump was convicted in Manhattan two years ago on charges of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal that erupted on the eve of the 2016 election, Mr. Blanche never lost his famous client’s trust. That was largely because he often mimicked his boss’s penchant for aggression, employing a brawl-and-stall style that blended legal bellicosity with persistent attempts to seek delays.
Mr. Blanche’s ties to Mr. Trump only grew stronger during the two cases Mr. Smith brought against him, one accusing Mr. Trump of seeking to overturn the 2020 election and the other charging him with illegally holding onto classified documents after he left office in 2021.
Those two cases, which Mr. Smith was forced to dismiss after Mr. Trump was re-elected, were not just victories for Mr. Blanche. They effectively set the agenda for his tenure at the Justice Department, where he has spent much of his time not only overseeing multiple attempts to use the courts to go after the president’s enemies, but also carrying out a widespread purge of the federal agents and prosecutors who worked on the Trump investigations.
He is proud of that work — or at least he has asserted as much in public.
During an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas over the weekend, Mr. Blanche bragged to an audience of Trump supporters that the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, had “cleaned house” at the bureau, firing everyone who had touched a Trump case.
“There isn’t a single man or woman with a gun, federal agent, still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump,” he said.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.
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