National Review Online
Wednesday, June 10, 2026
Todd Blanche has been everything President Trump wants in
an attorney general, and that’s the problem.
The president has nominated Blanche to become the
full-fledged attorney general, after a months-long audition as acting AG. Prior
to this, Blanche had been the Senate-confirmed deputy AG, while the
since-ousted Pam Bondi was in the top job. Unfortunately, Blanche has
distinguished himself in this interim period only as an instrument of Trump’s
unworthy and abusive campaign to investigate and prosecute his political
opponents.
The brute fact is that, no matter whose name is on the
DOJ letterhead, the president is running the Justice Department. He originally
installed Blanche as deputy AG — thanks to Senate Republican quiescence and a
strict party-line vote (52–46) back in March 2025 when Trump was at his
strongest — because Blanche had served as his loyal and zealous defense lawyer
during the onslaught of criminal prosecutions brought against Trump by
Democratic prosecutors at the federal and state level. On Blanche’s watch, the
Trump DOJ has pursued an unabashedly vindictive agenda of leveraging the
government’s awesome prosecutorial powers — its public trust — against the
president’s political enemies. To fight lawfare with lawfare.
While Blanche was in his deputy AG role, the DOJ
established its Orwellian “Weaponization Working Group.” The group’s mission is
twofold.
First, it pushes prosecutors to generate cases against
Trump’s political opponents, such as James Comey (who ran the FBI during the
Russiagate farce), New York Attorney General Letitia James (who brought a
massive state civil fraud suit against Trump, his adult children, and his
business empire), Senator Adam Schiff (the California Democrat who led the two
impeachment pushes in Trump’s first term), Jerome Powell (the former Federal
Reserve Board chairman with whom Trump clashed over interest rates), Lisa Cook
(a Biden-appointed Fed Board member Trump has tried to oust), and sundry Obama
and Biden administration officials — including former CIA director John Brennan
— whom Trump blames for spying on his first administration and orchestrating
his 2020 defeat.
Most of these efforts have been unsuccessful when
challenged in court (e.g., weak indictments of Comey and James have been thrown
out) but have had the desired effect of harassing their targets. The pursuit of
Powell and Cook gives the lie to the notion that this is all just “turnabout is
fair play” against people who abused the prosecutorial system themselves.
Second, the group seeks to discredit the Biden DOJ as
inherently corrupt. The idea is to brand as fraudulent the Biden-era special
counsel’s two indictments of Trump (notwithstanding significant proof of
misconduct) and to rationalize the president’s pardons of Capitol rioters and
financial fraudsters.
Some of the worst excesses of Trump DOJ lawfare occurred
immediately after Trump rebuked then-AG Bondi publicly (in a social media rant
that may have been published inadvertently) for failing to indict his enemies.
The flawed Comey and James indictments followed. Later, immediately after a
White House event at which the president scolded district U.S. attorneys for
their timidity, the failed Powell investigation commenced. (It has since been
abandoned, under congressional pressure.)
Bondi was still AG during these misadventures, but
Blanche was front and center — the deputy attorney general runs the DOJ day to
day, and all district U.S. attorneys report to him. Discouraging the president
from legally dubious initiatives was one of Main Justice’s chief roles in the
first term, but that has gone by the boards this time.
Though it’s only been two months, Blanche’s tenure as
acting AG has underscored the point. He wants the top job, even though, as our Ed Whelan explains, he could keep functioning as de
facto AG for the remainder of Trump’s term under statutes governing the DOJ and
acting appointments. That would obviate the need for a toxic confirmation
fight, during which Trump will inevitably pressure Republicans to rubber-stamp
his guy while Democrats make the vote as painful as possible for the GOP with
the midterms on the horizon.
The president made it clear that Blanche would have to
earn the AG nomination. He has dutifully produced. First, there was a new
indictment of Comey on the nonsensical charge that he threatened to murder the
president by posting a photograph of seashells on a beach, arranged to say, “86
47.” Then, perhaps more outrageously, Blanche purported to “settle” the
president’s bogus $10 billion civil lawsuit against his own Internal Revenue
Service (over an unlawful leak of Trump’s private tax information that occurred
on Trump’s own watch in 2019); Blanche did so by purporting to immunize Trump
from future audits for past conduct (which Blanche, who has no role at IRS,
appears to lack authority to do) and by establishing an “Anti-Weaponization
Fund” — underwritten by nearly $1.8 billion in taxpayer money — to pay
“damages” to Capitol rioters and other “victims” of Biden DOJ overreach. The
fund provoked even the habitually somnolent Republican-controlled Congress,
causing Blanche to rescind it.
Professional ethics rules demand that Blanche, as the
government’s lawyer, represent the public interest. In these indecorous
episodes, he has instead prioritized his continuing duty of fealty to Donald
Trump, his former private client. A lawyer in that conflicted position is
supposed to recuse himself. A lawyer who wants to be AG in the Trump
administration, by contrast, serves Trump.
Yet, Blanche himself is not the ultimate issue.
Certainly, he is competent to do the job. His sympathizers contend that no
stellar attorney general in the mold of a Michael Mukasey or Bill Barr would be
asked to serve, or would serve, as AG to Trump in his second-term incarnation.
Hence, we’re better off with Blanche, who has a strong prosecutorial background
and has, reportedly, fought off at least some of the lawfare gambits. The DOJ,
the thinking goes, will operate in a marginally less appalling fashion under
Blanche than it might under a wholly unqualified lackey (see, e.g., Trump’s
appointment of Bill Pulte as acting national intelligence director).
But the Blanche nomination is less about the nominee than
it is about the Justice Department. Congress has a constitutional obligation to
rein in executive abuses of power — as it did in pushing back against the
“Anti-Weaponization” slush fund. The arsenal the Framers provided to the Senate
for this purpose includes the power to refuse to confirm the president’s
appointees until the president ceases and desists in abusing his authority.
The Senate is, moreover, duty-bound to do what it can to
ensure that the Justice Department, created by Congress, fulfills its
constitutional and statutory obligation to enforce the law evenhandedly,
without fear, favor, or political bias.
It can’t fulfill this duty and also lend its imprimatur
to Blanche’s dubious handiwork as Trump’s ideal AG.
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