In Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump appears to have found the attorney general he has always wanted — one who shares his vision of a Justice Department tethered to the White House and who has demonstrated an ability to swiftly turn presidential demands into action.
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This week could determine whether he can officially clinch the job.
Blanche — the president’s former defense lawyer who was tapped last year to serve as the Justice Department’s No. 2 official — will face what is expected to be a contentious confirmation hearing Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee as he seeks a full term as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
Several key Republicans have not yet pledged their support. Sen. John Cornyn (Texas) and Sen. Thom Tillis (North Carolina), both members of the Judiciary Committee, have expressed reservations about Blanche’s involvement in the now-scuttled plan to create a nearly $1.8 billion taxpayer fund to compensate those who say they were unfairly targeted by the justice system, potentially including those convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
A federal judge on Monday criticized the Department of Justice, and Blanche specifically, in a case related to the fund, calling it an effort to “earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”
Others have also questioned Blanche’s role in the the public release of files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a process that has divided Trump’s base.
Blanche has held the position of acting attorney general since Trump fired his predecessor, Pam Bondi, in April. And in that time, Blanche has defended the president’s “right” to steer law enforcement investigations, breathed new life into probes targeting Trump’s political foes and aggressively moved to deploy department resources in response to the White House’s agenda.
Those efforts have earned him plaudits from the president. But they have left his Senate confirmation uncertain.
Democrats, meanwhile, have broadly united against the pick, casting Blanche as a dangerous “yes man” unable to put aside his past as Trump’s lawyer.
All it would take to potentially derail Blanche’s path toward confirmation is a single Republican on the Judiciary Committee to vote against advancing his nomination. Further complicating matters, it is not yet clear whether the chamber’s Republican leadership would appoint before Wednesday a replacement for another crucial committee member, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who died over the weekend.
Speaking to reporters last month, Cornyn said he had not yet made up his mind.
“The problem with the office of Attorney General is that … you are a member of the president’s Cabinet,” he said. “But you’re also the chief law enforcement officer for the country. And you’re not the president’s lawyer. So, I’ll be asking some questions about getting commitments on that.”
Tillis, too, has said he is still weighing his vote. But he told CNN after a recent one-on-one meeting with Blanche that he now has as more a “positive predisposition” toward the nomination. Still, Tillis said, “I’m going to go through the nomination process.”
That question of who Blanche serves — Trump or the American people — is expected to loom large over the proceedings set to play out this week.
In addition to Blanche, the Judiciary Committee will hear testimony from several witnesses Thursday on his suitability for the job. Should he survive a committee vote later this month, the Senate’s Republican leaders have said they hope to bring Blanche’s nomination for a full vote before the chamber’s recess in August.
With a 53-47 majority in the Senate, Republicans can only afford to lose three members, if Democrats are united against Blanche and Vice President JD Vance breaks a tie in his favor.
For his part, Blanche has kept a busy schedule since Trump announced his nomination last month, holding news conferences in Washington to highlight the department’s work prosecuting child traffickers, drug dealers and fraudsters and meeting with key senators to shore up support.
He has bristled at the notion that there’s any doubt over whose interests he’s been protecting at the Justice Department.
“I’m the acting attorney general, okay? The fact that I used to be President Trump’s lawyer is just a fact,” Blanche angrily insisted in May during a congressional hearing, in which Democrats accused him of unquestioning loyalty to the president.
But it is undeniable that should he be confirmed, Blanche will enter the job with a longer, more personal history with the president than any other previous occupant of the position to serve under Trump — a leader with a long record of fraught relationships with his attorneys general.
Less than two years into his first term, Trump fired Jeff Sessions, his first pick for the job, following months of acrimony over Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign — a move that cleared the way for the appointment of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.
Trump’s second Senate-confirmed attorney general, William P. Barr, fared little better, resigning after publicly contradicting the president’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Trump has since referred to Barr as “gutless,” a “swamp creature,” and a “weak and pathetic RINO,” the acronym for Republican in Name Only.
While the president has so far spared Bondi, the first attorney general of his second term, the same level of public rancor, he made no secret during her time on the job of his frustration with the slow pace of investigations he ordered up targeting his political foes.
Blanche’s bond with Trump was forged over years sitting side-by-side in court during the president’s years out of office.
As his personal attorney, Blanche saw Trump through his 2024 New York trial, which ended with Trump’s conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to an adult-film actress. Trump is appealing the case.
Blanche also led Trump’s defense in the two federal felony cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith — the first over his alleged retention of classified documents, the second over his attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Blanche devised the legal strategy in both cases focused on heavily delaying the proceedings through procedural motions that tied up progress for months, while displaying a knack for channeling the president’s sense of grievance as he sparred with judges and witnesses in court.
Those tactics paid off. Legal arguments from Blanche’s team persuaded a federal judge in Florida, whom Trump appointed to the bench in his first term, to toss out the classified documents case citing issues with Smith’s appointment. Smith dropped the election interference case after Trump won the 2024 election.
When Trump announced, shortly after that victory, that he would nominate Blanche to the Justice Department’s No. 2 position — even before picking Bondi as attorney general — some within the department greeted the choice with guarded optimism.
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Blanche had spent years working as a federal prosecutor in Manhattan, and afterward, as a partner in the prestigious New York firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft before his time with Trump.
Given that background, veteran federal prosecutors believed Blanche would bring to his new role a respect for the rule of law and the Justice Department’s history of independence from the White House.
They hoped he might serve as a moderating influence on a president who had promised disruptive change at the department and vowed prosecutions of his political enemies during his 2024 campaign.
More than 100 of Blanche’s former colleagues in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York signed onto a letter supporting his nomination for deputy attorney general last year and he sailed through his confirmation vote relatively unscathed.
“There was a belief among career Justice Department lawyers that Todd Blanche was going to save us,” wrote Liz Oyer, who Blanche fired as the department’s pardon attorney last year, in a recent Substack post.
But, with Blanche now up for the department’s top job, many of his former colleagues are lining up against him. Oyer is set to testify against Blanche’s nomination during Thursday’s committee hearing.
Last week, she was among more than 1,200 former Justice Department employees urging the Judiciary Committee to reject his nomination, penning a letter lamenting the role Blanche has played in the hollowing out of the department’s ranks.
Thousands of department employees have left or been fired since the start of Trump’s second term, many of whom were deemed insufficiently loyal to the president’s agenda.
Blanche dismissed the concerns raised in the letter in an interview with a local Alaska TV station.
“There’s 1,200 former DOJ employees, I think, out of what — 40,000?” he said. “I don’t know. I’m not a math guy, but that’s not a very high percentage.”
Others have expressed concern over the acceleration of several investigations targeting the president’s rivals since Blanche became acting attorney general.
Less than a month into the job, Blanche announced the indictment of former FBI director James B. Comey for posting a photo of seashells prosecutors say was meant as a threat to Trump. Comey has denied wrongdoing. Blanche has also pushed to advance an investigation underway in Florida targeting Trump critics, including former CIA director John O. Brennan, for alleged violations of the president’s civil rights.
Facing questions in April over the propriety of the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute Trump foes, Blanche defended the president’s right to direct the nation’s federal law enforcement at targets of his choosing.
“We have thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now, and it is true that some of them involve men, women and entities that the president in the past has had issues with and that he believes should be investigated,” Blanche said then. “That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that.”
Broadly, Republicans led by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chair of the Judiciary Committee, have lauded Blanche’s progress on the more conventional work of the Justice Department, like prosecuting fraud and efforts to combat illegal drugs.
“Blanche is well-qualified and has shown his dedication to restoring law and order across our country,” Grassley said in a statement.
Yet, it is the twin matters of Epstein and Blanche’s involvement in a deal the Justice Department struck with Trump to end a lawsuit over the leak of the president’s tax returns, that have most unsettled the Republican senators he needs to be confirmed.
Blanche took the lead in announcing the public release earlier this year of millions of pages of Justice Department files on Epstein. The rollout drew bipartisan backlash in Congress for mistakes that unveiled personal details of Epstein’s accusers and redactions that critics maintain could still be potentially shielding his accomplices.
In testimony before a House committee, Bondi repeatedly sought to shift responsibility for the release to Blanche, to whom she said she had delegated the job.
Then, in May, Blanche faced open revolt from some in his party as he unsuccessfully sought to defend a deal Trump made with the Justice Department to resolve the lawsuit he personally filed against the IRS.
Several Republican lawmakers expressed concern over the agreement’s proposed nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who believe they have been victims of politicized prosecutions.
Blanche’s refusal to rule out that some of the money could go toward those who faced charges for violently attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, drew the sharpest criticism and forced him, eventually, to return to Capitol Hill to announce plans for the fund were dead.
Other Republicans have questioned another aspect of the agreement signed off on by Blanche, which granted Trump, his family and their businesses immunity from past tax claims — a potentially lucrative benefit for a president who has frequently complained about audits of his past tax returns.
On Monday, the federal judge overseeing the now withdrawn lawsuit against the IRS excoriated the deal and accused the lawyers behind it, including Blanche, of abusing the court process and acting “wholly incompatibl[y] with the duties of the DOJ attorney.”
That assessment is sure to prompt further questioning at the Capitol Hill hearings this week.
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