In his first news conference as the nation’s most powerful law enforcement official, acting attorney general Todd Blanche defended the Justice Department’s repeated attempts to indict President Donald Trump’s political enemies and asserted that the president has a duty to speak out about who he believes should be investigated.
“We have thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now, and it is true that some of them involve men, women and entities that the president in the past has had issues with and that he believes should be investigated,” Blanche told reporters at the department’s headquarters Tuesday afternoon. “That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that.”
Trump tapped Blanche — his former defense attorney who has been serving as the Justice Department’s deputy attorney general — to succeed Attorney General Pam Bondi after he fired her last week. The president gave no public explanation for why he ousted Bondi, but The Washington Post reported that Trump was dissatisfied with Bondi’s failure to prosecute his political foes and her handling of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
At the Tuesday news conference, which was called to tout new efforts to combat fraud, Blanche said little about how he might lead differently than Bondi. But his public appearance signaled that he would remain close to the president and use his role to carry out Trump’s agenda.
Blanche brushed off criticism the department has faced for going after Trump’s foes. Instead — echoing a claim that has been made by the president and his administration — he said that the real weaponization of the Justice Department occurred when the agency indicted Trump during the Biden administration.
The president has not indicated how quickly — or whether — he intends to nominate a permanent replacement for Bondi. Any nominee would require confirmation by the Senate.
Blanche, who is currently also serving as the deputy attorney general, said he would be traveling with Bondi on Wednesday. Last week, Bondi said she would help Blanche transition to the new role, though the Justice Department has not said if she has a formal role in the administration.
Blanche would not divulge details about any conversations he has had with the president and claimed that he did not know why Bondi was fired.
“Nobody has any idea why the attorney general is no longer the attorney general and I’m the acting attorney general, except for President Trump,” Blanche said.
Blanche said the department would be creating a new unit to combat the “fraud crisis,” drawing from top prosecutors in Washington and U.S. attorney’s offices across the country. The National Fraud Enforcement Division will be headed by Colin McDonald. The White House created the division and nominated McDonald — a longtime federal prosecutor who has been co-leading the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group this administration.
The task force would pull largely from current employees, though Blanche said the agency could hire more people. He said that the department also would create a fraud detection center, which would aid law enforcement in analyzing the reams of paperwork and data that typically come with fraud investigations.
“We will spare no resources,” Blanche said. “The American people deserve an end to this crisis of fraud.”
In his new role, Blanche inherits a department under pressure from Trump to quickly produce results and facing the same roadblocks that undid Bondi’s tenure at the helm.
While other names have been floated for the role, a White House official told The Post last week that Blanche is “very likely” going to be running the department for the long term.
With Blanche in place, “right now, the president is happy,” the official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss Trump’s thinking on the matter.
Trump for months has made plain his frustration with the limited progress the department has made to date in prosecuting his political foes.
Cases it brought last year against two prominent Trump rivals — former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James — were thrown out after a judge ruled the prosecutor overseeing them had been illegally appointed.
Efforts to bring charges against others — including Jerome H. Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, and a group of Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video urging members of the military to resist illegal orders — were rejected by grand juries and courts.
Investigations of other top Trump targets continue, and Blanche will probably be tasked with securing indictments in these cases.
Federal prosecutors in southern Florida have been working to build a case against former CIA director John O. Brennan, and continue to gather evidence against others involved in the intelligence reporting around Russia’s attempts to interfere in Trump’s 2016 election victory.
Department lawyers have also been examining whether they can file charges tied to the 2020 election, which Trump has long claimed without evidence was stolen. But in pursuing those efforts and other priorities, Blanche and his leadership team are working with a diminished workforce.
More than 3,400 attorneys have left the Justice Department since last year, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management. Several of them were forced out by Bondi and Blanche for work they did during the previous administration on cases against Trump and people convicted of breaching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
On Tuesday, Blanche defended the decision to oust those employees, saying they could not ethically serve if they had investigated the president. Some of the former employees have pending lawsuits against the department, arguing they were wrongfully terminated for political reasons.
The acting attorney general also described the turnover of attorneys as normal and said he was not concerned about staffing. That claim has been contradicted by internal budgetary documents and assertions from current and former prosecutors in the department, who have said the department has been unable to keep up with caseloads or recruit qualified attorneys to backfill open slots.
The acting attorney general told reporters he did not know if he would be nominated to serve as the full-time attorney general, but said he served at the pleasure of the president.
“I did not ask for this job. … If President Trump chooses to keep me as acting, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate me, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else, and I go back to being the [deputy attorney general and] that’s an honor,” Blanche said. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘Thank you very much, I love you, sir.”
Natalie Allison contributed to this report.
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