In just his first week in office, Todd Blanche has inflicted more damage on the norms and traditions of the Department of Justice than any attorney general in its history. I don’t say this casually, and I’m not ignoring the competition. John Mitchell ran Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and went to federal prison for it. A. Mitchell Palmer used the DOJ to round up and deport thousands of people for their politics. Harry Daugherty turned it into a vehicle for graft, his cronies selling pardons and immunities like so many indulgences, earning the DOJ the nickname “the Department of easy virtue.”
These evil deeds damaged the department, but they were furtive and ended in disgrace. None of these men served up his conduct as a model for the DOJ to follow. Blanche, by contrast, has openly taken a blowtorch to standards that have been articles of faith at the department for 50 years. Puffed up with his Senate confirmation, President Trump’s former personal lawyer has taken on a renewed cockiness—arrogance, really—and proclaimed his and Trump’s perverted view of the attorney general as the new normal.
Consider these five separate betrayals of the department’s ideals.
1. Asked by Kristen Welker on Meet the Press whether he could pledge that the Justice Department would always act independently of the White House, Blanche was combative: “No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that.”
That gratuitous added sentence disparages the canonical approach of every attorney general for at least the last half-century. Most of them made the very pledge Blanche now declares inappropriate, and all of them lived by it.
Jeff Sessions, Trump’s very first attorney general, swore that the department’s actions “will not be improperly influenced by political considerations,” and that it “can never be used to retaliate politically against opponents.” Michael Mukasey, the conservative Republican AG brought in by President George W. Bush in 2007 to clean up the U.S. attorney firing scandals, told the Senate that staff who discussed cases with political actors would be fired. Merrick Garland put the principle most concisely at his own confirmation hearing in 2021: “I’m not the president’s lawyer. I am the United States’s lawyer.”
Blanche has now breezily declared that all of these predecessors in office were misguided in their fundamental approach to the job and justice.
2. Days after being sworn in, Blanche stood at the Nassau County Police Academy, flanked by uniformed officers, and warmed up a crowd for Bruce Blakeman, Trump’s endorsed candidate for governor of New York, praising him for doing “everything we need him to do.” No attorney general in at least 100 years has appeared at a political rally for a candidate; I suspect none would even have entertained the idea. The conduct can only undermine public confidence in the Department’s impartiality.
Blanche’s imprudence served to silence the senator whose vote secured his confirmation: Pressed by a reporter about the rally, Bill Cassidy went quiet, then meekly pleaded that he had “never heard anything about that rally until this very minute.”
3. On Thursday, August 13, Blanche delivered a cynical speech to DOJ staff in the Great Hall of Main Justice. He served up empty pieties, most remarkably his assurance that the department would uphold the law “without fear or favor”—the best capsule description of its mission as there is.
As the assembled staffers surely understood, Blanche’s tenure has been—and by every indication will continue to be—marked by justice meted out with both fear and favor. As deputy attorney general and then acting attorney general, Blanche has spent a year presiding over the unwarranted prosecution of political enemies; the sweetheart treatment of January 6 defendants and others who cozy up to Trump; and the firings of DOJ prosecutors for the political sin of doing their jobs by pursuing guilty defendants who now happen to enjoy the president’s favor. He has crowed about forcing out all the prosecutors and agents who worked on the January 6 cases, and he did the same to prosecutors who were assigned to work on cases against defendants who blocked women from entering reproductive service clinics.
4. On Fox News Sunday, after a district court and court of appeals both ordered a halt to construction of the president’s ballroom for failure to obtain congressional approval, Blanche waved away the ruling: “We don’t believe we have to go to Congress. We believe Congress has already given us the authority to do what we’re doing.” It’s not the attorney general’s role to dismiss binding court orders, on television no less.
5. Finally, there is the ludicrous load of crap Blanche served up in a Meet the Press appearance. Asked what he would do if the president directed him to cross an ethical or legal line, he dodged the one-word answer the moment called for. He offered instead a transparently silly claim: “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”
What a whopper, from the lips of the chief federal law-enforcement officer in the land. Appearances at political rallies are unethical; reprisal prosecutions are illegal; and there’s plenty more Blanche has done in each category. Trump has insisted on bringing cases against his enemies, and Blanche has championed his supposed authority to do so.
Trump has forced out those who moved too slowly, including previous Attorney General Pam Bondi, for failing to deliver his enemies’ heads on a plate. On September 20, Trump posted on Truth Social that James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Leticia James were all “all guilty as hell” and that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” A hand-picked loyalist secured the Comey indictment days later, and in an open court the government’s own advocate conceded that if the president’s post “is not a direction to prosecute, I’d really be in a loss to say what is.” As would anyone.
Blanche’s blithe assurance is a classic authoritarian move, one we have seen from Trump himself repeatedly over the last 20 months: Don’t merely lie; proclaim the exact opposite of the truth, and stand your ground shamelessly.
A. Mitchell Palmer and Harry Daugherty damaged the DOJ by what they did, but none tried to change what it was. Blanche is attacking the institution at its foundations in broad daylight, sawing away at its core principles and rewriting its basic mission. That is why his first week belongs in a shameful category of its own.
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