You may never have heard of Donald Trump’s chief “yes-man”, Todd Blanche, but his story is a cautionary tale for the ages.
Trump’s acting Attorney-General has already endured humiliation after humiliation in order to protect his boss. Blanche is now poised to become arguably the most powerful lawyer on earth as Trump’s nominee to run the US Department of Justice outright.
On Thursday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on whether to advance his nomination. If he loses, it will be a historic failure. But if he wins, the job he’s fighting for is likely to destroy him. And the world will see how far Trump will go if he is unrestrained.
Blanche’s expected confirmation has already had several unintended effects for Trump, among them directing renewed attention towards the Jeffrey Epstein controversy. One of the most serious investigations in DOJ’s history was inexplicably shut down on Blanche’s watch and remains suspended in what critics view as a blatant attempt to protect the President and the President’s allies. (Blanche has said he will pursue anyone who can be criminally linked to the late paedophile’s sex-trafficking operation if new evidence emerges.)
Last year, the former prosecutor personally flew to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, the British socialite convicted of trafficking girls,a week before she was moved to more comfortable quarters – no connection between these two events has been proven, however. He presided over a botched release of the Epstein files and only after he was forced to do so by Congress, and the rollout was so sloppy that survivors’ names, images, and accounts of their abuse were exposed, while the names of potential abusers stayed blacked out. Meanwhile, a federal judge, no longer willing to take Blanche’s word, has ordered Blanche to hand over unreacted documents directly to the judge’s chambers this week because he apparently doubts the DOJ is telling the truth about them.
On Wednesday, on the grounds of the US Capitol, Epstein survivors will stand alongside senators and pro-democracy leaders (I will be among them) to announce that the 3.5 million Epstein files are going on a national tour, so the public never forgets the still smouldering scandal that the Trump administration has seemingly tried to brush under the carpet.
Blanche set fire to his reputation when he agreed to be Trump’s personal criminal defence attorney. He was the man at the defence table in Manhattan when Trump became the first American president convicted of a felony. But this week is the ultimate showcase of how he might debase himself in an effort to protect his employer.
Blanche has submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee more than 400 pages of written answers , which historians may one day study as a case study in evasion. More than 160 times, he declared it would be “inappropriate” for him to answer a question. Asked directly whether he would revive a scheme that senators of both parties have condemned (Trump’s billion-dollar slush fund for allies) if the President ordered him to do so, Blanche refused to say.
The two Republican holdouts standing between him and confirmation are not asking for much. They’re asking him to put on paper what he has already claimed under oath – to promise in writing there will be no more slush funds and no sweetheart deals for the president. His refusal tells you everything about who he believes his real client is.
Acting US Attorney-General Todd Blanche is hoping to be rewarded for his loyalty (Photo: Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)The confirmation process has revealed the low esteem in which fellow lawyers of all political persuasions hold him. More than 1,200 former Justice Department officials — spanning multiple administrations, Republican and Democratic, including dozens who worked in Blanche’s own former office in Manhattan — signed a letter urging the Senate to reject him, accusing him of instilling a “culture of fear” and failing his oath to the Constitution. The counter-letter mustered by his allies drew fewer than 80 names.
Blanche’s reputation has been shredded. But what he doesn’t yet understand is that the worst outcome for him this week is victory. I know, because I watched his predecessors do the calculus.
I worked with both of Trump’s former Attorneys-General, Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr, and their teams during the first Trump administration, when I served as chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security. Whatever criticisms people had of those men — and I had plenty — they generally pushed back on Trump’s anti-constitutional conduct. That usually meant coming to the White House for the same kinds of meetings we all had to sit through, where the president would rant about the people who’d wronged him, the problems he wanted solved by any means, and more than anything, his fury at the restraints of the office.
After those meetings, these men would go back to their departments. They’d confer with their teams. And after weighing Trump’s more egregious schemes, they’d conclude that it wasn’t worth going to prison for him. Should they allow Trump to launder money between his pet projects in ways the law forbade? Nope. Invoke the Insurrection Act to turn the military on American demonstrators? Nope. Launch revenge prosecutions against James Comey and Hillary Clinton without an ounce of factual predicate? Nope. They didn’t want to own Trump’s misconduct by affixing their signatures to it. Barr resigned rather than stay and be party to the President’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Sessions resigned at Trump’s request.
The Attorney-General is a constitutional circuit breaker between a president’s worst impulses and the machinery of the state. Blanche is expected to remove it. He has spent his tenure proving the point, including by signing a deal that could allow Trump to personally avoid tax scrutiny for the rest of his life, purging career prosecutors who might say “no” to unlawful orders and answering “inappropriate” whenever a senator asks whether there is anything he would refuse to do for Trump. There’s a reason some of us have called him Todd “Carte Blanche”, as his loyalty to the President appears to be a blank cheque.
To be clear, Blanche is already seen in Washington as a bad-faith actor who did questionable things for a powerful client and an unprincipled president. He will undoubtedly face years of depositions, bar proceedings, congressional hearings and an ethics complaint signed by more than 100 former judges that will await him when he leaves office.
If he becomes Attorney-General then things will only get worse. Blanche will officially become the legal architect of an administration that hundreds of federal judges, across literally thousands of cases, have ruled has broken the law — a judicial paper trail without precedent in American history. And the schemes yet to come will get a lawyer’s signature. Whether it’s more wars carried out without congressional approval, an actual attempt to seize Greenland, tariff regimes conjured from fake emergencies, or foreign deals enriching the president’s family while he holds office, he’ll be left to account for the unaccountable.
It’s the highest-risk job on earth. And for what? Trump discards lawyers the way he discards wives and creditors. Michael Cohen went to prison for him. Rudy Giuliani was disbarred and bankrupted for him. His former chief lawyers, Sessions and Barr, looked at the train wreck and walked away while they still could.
Asked by a TV host whether Trump faced a binary fate in the 2024 election, the White House or the “big house” (prison) because of his legal cases, Blanche said this was “absolutely” the case.
Todd Blanche stood beside Donald Trump as a defence lawyer. He’s hoping to be rewarded for that loyalty. The question that should keep him up at night is simpler than any a senator has asked: When the reckoning comes — for everything he’ll be asked to do on Trump’s behalf — who will stand beside Todd Blanche?
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