When Pam Bondi was fired as attorney general last week, people familiar with the decision described how President Trump was dissatisfied with her handling of the Epstein files and her failure to bring more criminal cases against his political enemies.
But on Tuesday, the man named to temporarily succeed her as the nation’s top law enforcement official said only the president knew his reasons.
In his first news conference since being elevated to acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, who represented the president in a series of criminal cases, said “nobody has any idea” what led to Ms. Bondi’s dismissal other than the president. “I grow tired of people in the media saying why President Trump did or didn’t do something because President Trump is the only one that knows that,” Mr. Blanche said.
Describing Ms. Bondi as “a trusted friend of President Trump’s,” Mr. Blanche elaborated, sort of. The news conference was primarily about the rollout of a new division in the Justice Department devoted to pursuing fraud.
“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,” Mr. Blanche said, saying that he loves the job he has, while acknowledging the uncertainty around who would next oversee the Justice Department.
A former defense lawyer for the president who had been serving as the No. 2 official at the Justice Department, Mr. Blanche said that he did not know whether he or someone else would be nominated to serve as the attorney general. “I did not ask for this job,” he said, adding that he would travel with Ms. Bondi on Wednesday on a previously scheduled work trip.
The president has privately and publicly complained that the Justice Department has not been aggressive enough in pursuing criminal cases against those he dislikes, including the former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, and the attorney general of New York, Letitia James. But Mr. Blanche denied anything untoward about the president’s approach to the department.
“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 believe should be investigated and that is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that,” Mr. Blanche said. He added: “People say the president wants to go after his political enemies. No, the president has said time and time again that he wants justice.”
In his remarks, Mr. Blanche suggested that the department’s new fraud division would seemingly take precedence over the longstanding work of a separate arm of the department’s criminal division, also dedicated to pursuing fraud. “We will spare no resources,” Mr. Blanche said, “to bring strong cases and do justice.”
Justice Department lawyers were notified on Tuesday that significant parts of the criminal division’s fraud prosecutors, including those handling financial markets, health care and consumer fraud cases, would move to the new entity. Mr. Blanche also said officials would launch a national fraud detection center, though he twice referred to it as a “detention center.”
Devlin Barrett covers the Justice Department and the F.B.I. for The Times.
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