When he was the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Todd Blanche ejected his subordinate Ed Martin, then the leader of the agency’s “anti-weaponization” task force, from offices on the fourth floor at headquarters to a satellite site an 18-minute Uber ride across town.
Mr. Blanche had long complained that Mr. Martin, whose demands for retribution tracked closely with President Trump’s own calls for vengeance, spent too much of his time taunting his targets, and too little time knuckling down to conduct effective investigations, Mr. Blanche told people in his orbit when he made the move in February.
Many people inside the department, and even some critics of Mr. Blanche on the outside, viewed the Martin episode as a modest victory for normalcy. It seemed to feed into a narrative, which flourished and faded in the early days of the administration, that Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor, would at least try to mitigate Mr. Trump’s excesses and caprices.
“There was a belief among career Justice Department lawyers that Todd Blanche was going to save us,” Liz Oyer, who was ousted as the department’s pardon attorney by Mr. Blanche last year, wrote in a recent post on Substack.
That was a major misreading, Ms. Oyer now says. “It’s hard to even describe how bad things got,” she added in the post, reflecting a widely held view not just among critics of Mr. Trump but among career officials inside the department.
Mr. Blanche, elevated to acting attorney general in April when Mr. Trump fired Pam Bondi, promoted an expansive view of executive power as Mr. Trump’s defense lawyer in three of the criminal cases against him, a perspective that remains his lodestar. An attorney general is obligated under Article II of the Constitution to comply with a president’s lawful demands, he has argued.
On Monday, Mr. Trump nominated Mr. Blanche to be attorney general, after a two-month flurry of department activity that seems to have erased any doubts that Mr. Blanche, a former Democrat who has drawn criticism from some Trump supporters, was not all in.
“It is extraordinarily hypocritical and extraordinarily rich for these critics, as you call them, to focus on what this administration is doing, when almost to a person they remain dead silent for four years while we saw what happened during the Biden administration with President Trump,” he told CBS News this month, when Mr. Trump had yet to name a permanent successor to Ms. Bondi.
Mr. Blanche declined to say whether the president had directly ordered him to investigate handpicked targets, saying only that Mr. Trump had “much better, bigger and important things to do than to worry about me doing my job.”
He added that he woke up every day with a “clean conscience” about the job he was doing.
In interviews and congressional testimony over the past six weeks, Mr. Blanche has tried to focus on more conventional projects he is overseeing, like continuing efforts to combat fentanyl trafficking that were championed by Ms. Bondi. He has also emphasized his role in establishing a new fraud task force, and in pressing Congress to increase funding for the chronically cash-starved and understaffed Bureau of Prisons.
Mr. Blanche, 51, has repeatedly denied singling out investigative targets for political reasons, telling CBS that “it is absolutely not true” that he was part of a Trump-led campaign of retribution. The fact that the department files “hundreds” of criminal cases each day belied the idea that he was not acting in good faith, he added.
Yet Mr. Trump has explicitly called upon Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche to go after his enemies — and they have often done so.
Even before Ms. Bondi’s abrupt removal, Mr. Blanche had been working with her on a spree of investigative actions intended to demonstrate progress to an impatient White House, including plans to move against the former C.I.A. director John O. Brennan and a former White House aide, Cassidy Hutchinson. A few weeks after Ms. Bondi was dismissed, Mr. Blanche approved the indictment of James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, for posting a photo of seashells arranged to read “86-47.”
That Mr. Blanche, who has occasionally assumed an adult-in-the-room role, sets him apart from less polished and more overtly partisan players. Mr. Martin, by contrast, once posed in his Columbo-style trench coat outside the house of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, one of the officials Mr. Trump has singled out for prosecution.
But he has more often been a speed bump, rather than a stop sign, according to current and former officials.
His record, both as Ms. Bondi’s No. 2 and as acting attorney general, has been one of loyalty to Mr. Trump. He has shown time and again a willingness to execute West Wing demands, even when he viewed them as politically unwise or destined to fail in court. His signature, often literally, is on every major action the department has taken.
Unlike many other Trump advisers, Mr. Blanche has been willing to offer relatively unvarnished legal and strategic counsel, in part because of the candid working relationship he developed with the president during Mr. Trump’s legal fights.
Last fall, Mr. Blanche and Ms. Bondi advised the White House against pursuing mortgage fraud charges against Ms. James, a plan pushed by Bill Pulte, a senior housing official Mr. Trump recently chose to be the acting director of national intelligence. Mr. Blanche also resisted efforts to install Lindsey Halligan, an inexperienced White House lawyer, as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
He was overruled, but went along, according to former officials. A federal judge eventually ruled that Ms. Halligan had been illegally appointed, and tossed out indictments against Ms. James and Mr. Comey, who had been charged in the same district on charges that he lied to Congress.
Last month, Mr. Blanche signed an order creating a $1.8 billion compensation fund for people who claimed to have been victims of unfair Justice Department prosecutions. He was forced to withdraw it last week after a rare revolt by Senate Republicans who viewed it as an ethical, legal and political abomination.
Again, Mr. Blanche expressed concerns internally about a possible backlash against the plan, while saying privately that it had passed muster legally. Again, his concerns were brushed aside, and he assented to being the face of a doomed policy.
Mr. Blanche — known for patiently enduring Mr. Trump’s outbursts during criminal proceedings in 2023 and 2024 — defended the decision during a bruising closed-door session in May with the same Republican senators who must now vote on his confirmation.
Earlier this month, he again walked the political plank before a House committee. Even as he scrapped the fund idea, he steadfastly defended a provision that potentially shields Mr. Trump, his family and his business from $100 million in tax liabilities.
Mr. Blanche did seek to put a little distance between himself and the secret negotiations that led to both agreements, saying he had delegated the details to one of his deputies.
As he moves from a supporting player to a cabinet-level profile, Mr. Blanche has cast aside the button-down, lawyerly circumspection and become increasingly willing to speak publicly about ongoing investigations.
In an interview on “Hang Out with Sean Hannity,” a Fox News podcast that was released last week, Mr. Blanche conceded that the department could not indict all of those he believed had acted improperly. But he said that “outing what happened” was an acceptable investigative goal in the absence of criminal cases.
“It’s not necessarily that a crime was committed,” he said. “But we are, we are, we are putting a memo out, we’re putting on information, so that everybody knows that we kind of self-cleaned, and this isn’t going to happen again.”
That, in a sense, echoed the philosophy of the man he butted heads with, Mr. Martin, who has retained his job as the department’s pardon attorney (along with its out-of-the-way offices). He has said that naming and shaming Mr. Trump’s enemies — as opposed to identifying a crime, then figuring out who committed it — is a legitimate end in itself.
Mr. Blanche went on to name names — many, many names — and openly discussed a so-called grand conspiracy investigation that seeks to tie together many investigations into the president in a single purported plot to deprive Mr. Trump of his rights. His comments represented a sharp break with a Justice Department policy that bars the public discussion of open inquiries, particularly those involving grand juries.
At the end of the podcast, Mr. Hannity’s producers posted a disclaimer in all capital letters, slapping asterisks on almost every person Mr. Blanche had discussed.
It read: “John Brennan, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Matthew Colangelo, Arthur Engoron and James Clapper have not been charged with any crimes in connection with any alleged conspiracy. Charges against James Comey related to alleged false statements and obstruction have been dismissed. There have been no findings that Rod Rosenstein, Tim Walz, Gavin Newsom or Jacob Frey engaged in professional misconduct.”
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