‘todd’s Sort Of Lead Horse’: Trump’s Former Criminal Defense Lawyer Ascends Doj

Todd Blanche — the deputy attorney general and a front-runner to take over for ousted Attorney General Pam Bondi — is a dyed-in-the-wool Trump loyalist who relishes every opportunity to pick a fight on the president's behalf.

Blanche will be the first acting attorney general in modern history to have been the president’s personal criminal defense lawyer. He either defended or helped spearhead some of the Justice Department’s most controversial actions under Trump, including purging career staff and trying to pursue criminal charges against the president’s perceived foes. And he has tackled one of the most vexing issues the administration has faced: the Epstein files.

“Todd's sort of lead horse here, okay, and everyone here really gets along with him. He's very accessible,” said a senior White House official, who was granted anonymity to discuss personnel matters. “Todd has been with the president for a very long time.”

Blanche isn’t shy about highlighting his tenure as Trump’s personal lawyer, despite criticism that it presents a conflict of interest in his work at the Justice Department. “I represented President Trump in the Manhattan D.A. case and in Jack Smith's prosecutions,” Blanche said last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference when asked about the weaponization of the Justice Department. “So I lived it every single day for two years, what was happening.”

In the hours after Trump’s announcement that Blanche would take the top spot, at least temporarily, some pointed to his resume as a liability, though it also includes eight years of work as a federal prosecutor.

“The DOJ is not a personal law firm, yet Donald Trump has installed another one of his former personal defense lawyers to lead the DOJ,” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) wrote on social media Thursday. “His blind allegiance to Trump is not a qualification for the job. He is wholly unfit to lead the DOJ.”

The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

During his year-long tenure as deputy attorney general, Blanche became the public face of many of the administration’s priorities, including the installation of loyalist U.S. attorneys in districts around the country and its “war” with “rogue, activist judges.”

And Blanche has defended the Justice Department’s indictments, now dismissed, of Trump’s political foes, in part by noting the criminal cases against Trump as well as Blanche’s work in defending him.

“When I read now that we’re weaponizing, I feel like I’m being gaslit, because we’re doing exactly the opposite,” Blanche said in November. “I take umbrage at the idea that the work that our prosecutors are doing is weaponization, because I have receipts. I know what happened the past couple years. I’ve lived it.”

But Blanche is perhaps most prominent with the Epstein files, where he took the lead after aseries of blunders by Bondi.

Blanche was behind the lectern at the department’s headquarters when the administration released millions of Epstein documents in late January. He made the rounds on TV defending the administration’s handling of the release. And he has aggressively attacked the administration’s critics on social media.

He came under fire for the department’s handling of the files, as victims and some members of Congress criticized the redaction process for inadvertently revealing victim identifying information and for withholding, at least temporarily, documents that contained unverified sexual assault allegations against Trump.

“There was drama about missing files, that we’re holding, covering things up,” Blanche said during an interview on “The Katie Miller Podcast,” hosted by the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller. “The evidence of the missing files came from the Epstein files. So, they're not missing files, and we went back and adjusted that right away.” Blanche added: “President Trump has said from Day 1, ‘I have nothing to hide.’”

Still, even Blanche, while seeking to close the book on Epstein, has acknowledged the turmoil over the subject is unlikely to subside.

“I think that there's a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents,” Blanche said at a press conference earlier this year. “And there's nothing I can do about that.”