As Todd Blanche takes charge of the Justice Department next month, he’ll come armed with a deeper history with President Donald Trump than any prior occupant to serve in that role under the famously mercurial president.
Blanche, the president’s former personal attorney, stood by his side leading his defense when Trump faced prosecutions during his years out of office, including some brought by the Justice Department. And Blanche impressed the once and future president during that period, even after Trump was convicted in one of those cases.
But that history might not be enough.
In his new role as acting attorney general, Blanche will inherit many of the same pressures that undid Pam Bondi before Trump announced Thursday that he had decided to oust her — namely, the president’s desire to see his political enemies put on trial. Blanche will also face the same obstacles to success, including courts and grand juries who have rejected many of the Justice Department’s efforts so far to prosecute the president’s foes.
Hours after Trump said Blanche would temporarily lead the agency, the 51-year-old former federal prosecutor expressed confidence in his ability to do the job and sought to tie himself to the president’s perspective.
“The president is frustrated, everyone is frustrated,” he told Fox News in an interview Thursday, his first since Trump said he would become acting attorney general. “What we saw happen for the last four years is unforgivable and can never happen again. So I don’t mind the frustration; I appreciate the frustration.”
Trump’s decision to oust Bondi, announced in a social media post, came after months of frustration with her leadership and the pace — and limited success — in bringing cases against his political foes.
Replacing her was something Trump “had been mulling for a long time, for a variety of reasons,” said a person with knowledge of Trump’s thinking, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. “He liked Pam a lot personally but was not satisfied with her job performance.”
Bondi had unsuccessfully lobbied to stay on longer, the person said. But ultimately Trump decided he wanted a change.
As Bondi’s chief deputy — a role Blanche has held since last year — he has played an outsize role in many of the decisions that have left Trump frustrated with the department’s progress to date.
Trump lauded Blanche as “a very talented and respected Legal Mind” — qualities the president was able to directly observe over years sitting by Blanche at defendant’s tables. Blanche represented Trump in his New York hush money case, which went to trial in 2024 and ended with him convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records.
He also led Trump’s defense in the two federal felony cases special counsel Jack Smith lodged against the then-former president — the first over his alleged retention of classified documents, the second over his attempts to overturn the results of his 2020 election loss.
Blanche devised a legal strategy in both cases focused heavily on delaying the proceedings through procedural motions that tied up progress for months.
Those tactics paid off. Legal arguments from Blanche’s team persuaded a federal judge in Florida, whom Trump appointed to the bench during his first term, to toss the classified documents case, citing issues with Smith’s appointment. After Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Smith dropped the election interference case.
For those efforts, Blanche was rewarded with the No. 2 position in the Justice Department — a nomination Trump announced within days of his reelection, even before he settled on naming Bondi as his attorney general.
But even in a Justice Department littered with former Trump lawyers — including Stanley E. Woodward Jr, the agency’s No. 3 official; Emil Bove, who served in a key role before Trump nominated him last year to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; Solicitor General D. John Sauer; and Alina Habba, a special adviser to the attorney general — Blanche’s influence stands out.
While overseeing day-to-day management of operations, he has taken on an increasingly public role as the face of the Justice Department in television interviews and conference appearances in recent months.
It was Blanche who publicly defended the department’s decision in January not to open a civil rights investigation into the fatal shooting of Renée Good in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers, saying that “there has to be circumstances or facts that warrant an investigation.”
He also took the lead in announcing the department’s congressionally compelled efforts to publicly release its files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And in a highly unusual move, Blanche traveled to Florida to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s imprisoned ex-girlfriend, over several days last year.
Many inside the department had hoped the eight years Blanche spent earlier in his career as a violent crimes prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office would lead him to be a moderating check on many of Trump’s more extreme expectations for the department.
And to a degree, current and former Justice Department employees said, those hopes have borne out behind the scenes.
When prosecutors faced demands for swift action in their classified documents case against former national security adviser turned Trump critic John Bolton, Blanche pushed last year to give them more time to shore up the evidence, The Washington Post has reported.
And in September, Blanche joined Bondi in advocating to save the job of Erik S. Siebert, the former U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, who concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge two other Trump targets — former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) — with crimes.
Trump ousted Siebert anyway, replacing him with Lindsey Halligan, who secured indictments against both of them. Those indictments were later thrown out by a judge who ruled Halligan had been illegally appointed.
But despite those flashes of restraint, current and former employees say they have been alarmed by Blanche’s broader willingness to acquiesce to Trump’s demands and embrace of the president’s drive to end the Justice Department’s traditional independence from the White House.
Speaking at a Federalist Society event last year, Blanche described the department as “at war” with “rogue activist judges” who have restrained many key planks of Trump’s agenda in his first year in office — a framing that sparked concern among many in the department who have long viewed the judiciary as an independent branch of government to be respected
Last month, he boasted during an appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas that in just over a year, the Justice Department had cleaned house of every prosecutor and FBI agent who had worked on the cases targeting Trump.
“There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” he said.
But the most important metric of success Blanche faces in his new role may be his ability to deliver Trump results in cases the president has focused on. Investigations into several Trump rivals — including former CIA director John Brennan, Rep. Adam Schiff (D-California) and others — remain underway.
The department has also launched inquiries aimed at substantiating Trump’s long-held grievances over his 2020 election loss, which remains a central fixation for the president despite repeated audits and investigations that have found no evidence of widespread fraud sufficient to sway the results.
“The Department of Justice is working hard every day,” Blanche told Fox News after Trump named him to the position. “It was working hard yesterday, and we’re going to keep on working hard tomorrow.”
Natalie Allison contributed to this report.
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