From Trump’s Attorney to Attorney General: The Rise of Todd Blanche

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From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barrow. This is the Daily. To be confirmed as the next Attorney General, Todd Blanche must convince members of the US Senate that despite how political the Department of Justice has now become, it would be even worse without him at the top.

Today, as his confirmation hearings begin, my colleague, Glenn Thrush, recounts the

“unlikely story of how Blanche became Trump's legal enforcer.”

It's Wednesday, July 15th. Hey, Glenn. Hello. Good morning to you, sir. Good morning to you, sir.

Where's there an echo in here? Is there an echo in here? All right, well, on to business. Glenn, in a few hours, Wednesday morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to begin confirmation hearings for President Trump's next pick to be his Attorney General,

Blanche, and increasingly, it looks like this hearing is going to be pre-complicated and the outcome genuinely uncertain.

“We're at a pretty precarious moment for the Department of Justice and for Todd Blanche.”

Over the past six weeks, really at President Trump's prompting, Blanche oversaw the creation

of this incredibly controversial and highly unusual 1.8 billion dollar fund to compensate

purported victims of Biden and Obama era justice department overreach. The J.6 defendants and people who were subject to other investigations. And in late May, the Senate Republicans just had it, they called in Blanche and for about an hour, grilled him, lambasted him, told him it was totally unacceptable. So the dynamic here is the Republicans in the Senate have been incredibly skeptical of recent

moves that Blanche has made in coordination with Trump. Now Blanche has spent the better part of a month trying to clean that stuff up, but there are still several members in the Senate and a couple of members on the Senate Judiciary Committee who really have serious tough questions for him, and this is really a first for someone who is facing Cabinet scrutiny.

What do you mean a first?

We're just in a totally different environment than the first wave of Trump Cabinet nominees. They all basically got a pass. There was some tough questioning, but that was a period of time early on when Republicans were just inclined to line up and give the president as much authority as possible. We're long past that and the gravitational pull of the midterm elections is forcing a lot

of these Republicans who had been in line to start raising some serious questions. So there's a lot of skepticism from increasingly independent-minded, agitated, midterm, fearful Republican senators of Todd Blanche. Let's talk about how Blanche became Trump's pick for attorney general, how he got onto Trump's radar, and became the person he hopes will define the remaining years of the

second term when it comes to the department of justice.

Just tell us the Blanche story. So this is what's perhaps most interesting. There are not a lot of data points in his biography that would have indicated he would have gone down this path. Blanche, from the interviews I've done over the past year and a half, was a pretty vanilla

federal prosecutor from the Southern District of New York to be described as the Yankee Stadium of Federal Prosecutor's Office, that's where Rudy Giuliani sort of gameed his fame. Blanche rises through the ranks of that office, and like a lot of these guys got to mid-life and decided he wanted to cash in, right?

So he jumps to a big time, white shoe law firm in 2017 in New York, and at some point

enlist him to the criminal defense team representing Paul Manafort, Trump's first campaign

chairman. And that really throws Blanche into this rotation of Trump criminal defense lawyers. What's fascinating is, in the period, after Trump loses in 2020, Blanche had a decision to make at this point in time. He could have cut bait from Trump.

It really looked like Trump was a losing cause, but instead what he did was he insisted on representing Trump at this low-end moment. Over the objections of the leadership of his law firm and actually broke from his firm, started his own firm and threw in his lot with Trump, and like so many of these entrepreneurial

characters in Trump's second term, that decision is what really bonded him to Trump.

He took a big risk on Trump, and that to the president is really the ultimate bond. So just to be clear, Blanche quits this prestigious white shoe law firm job. He has the one he took to make money once he left government in order to take Trump on as a client. That's the bet.

Yeah.

“And I think he made a decision that this was a big shot.”

Not everybody gets an opportunity to represent a former president of the United States. And we have seen that element of his character.

It's almost like the fear of missing out that we talk about in Washington.

Blanche wanted to be in the center of action. And I think he was willing to risk kind of a pedestrian successful career in the law to go for the big prize. So once Blanche decides to work with Trump, what ends up being the nature of this partnership between defense lawyer and his client.

So the big moment came in the spring of 2023, and when Alvin Bragg, Manhattan District Attorney Indite Donald Trump on 34 counts, this is the hushed money case that involves stormy Daniels, diversion of Trump organization, cash to potentially pay her off. Blanche comes in and he really exhibits some of this tenacity and willingness to go to the map for Donald Trump that has kind of characterized his relationship with the president

and the endeared him to Trump.

“The big moment that people have talked to me about and really remember was the cross-examination”

of the former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. Star witness in that case, because he, according to Michael Cohen, organizes the payment to stormy Daniels to keep her quiet. Yeah, and Blanche just sets about in sort of classic criminal defense lawyer fashion to dismantle Michael Cohen, demolishing his integrity, so he berates Cohen on the stand and just accuses

him of being flat out liar, and then he reminds Cohen that Cohen had once called Trump a dictator and said that the former president belonged in a cage like an animal. Right. You're trying to make the point to the jury that Cohen so had it in for Trump that he could not be objective and truthful in his testimony about Trump.

Exactly. And even though Trump didn't prevail, that kind of fight really impressed the president. And Blanche's performance in general was regarded as being pretty solid in a case that seemed to be an uphill climb for Trump. That said, sources have told me that there was a lot of back and forth, you know, between

these court dates and Trump, as he is with all of his lawyers, was not afraid to speak his mind, was not afraid to yell at Blanche, and Blanche, I am told while he was respectful to Trump, was also not afraid to express his opinion directly to Trump. So they develop a trusting candidate, maybe even at times kind of fiery respect for each other.

Yeah, I mean, like every relationship with Trump, it's a one-sided relationship. He's an employee, but he was one of those very few people who could truth tell to Trump, who could tell him no, I am doing this to save you. And it's right around this time that Blanche's embrace of Trump becomes really personal. He switches from having been a Democrat to the Republican party and moves to Florida,

not too far from Trump. But of course, the Hush 20 case wasn't the only case facing, Trump at that time, he had other big federal cases against him that Blanche is working on. This is what really puts Todd Blanche on the national stage.

“And so I think it's now Todd Blanche, former President Trump's lead in defense of Trump.”

I'm standing here with Todd Blanche, obviously one of Donald Trump's lead attorneys.

Trump is indicted on the classified documents case in Florida and his activities around

the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

“Trump is dissatisfied with his initial legal team and he puts Blanche in charge.”

These cases should not have been charged, period. Anyway, we can get them dismissed. And from then on Blanche, prove himself to be a manager of this sort of ungainly team of lawyers. And if it's a immunity, we're going to get that case dismissed as well. And he hones in on what people call a stall and brawl strategy.

The former President is currently embroiled in several cases, as approach is the same to lay, to lay, to lay. And then the clock out to get it as close to the 2024 election as possible. And really right legal briefs, almost as if they were true social posts. What are we doing?

I mean, when you think about foreign diamonds for four separate types of conduct and four separate jurisdictions, I don't have any clients that have indictments everywhere. He's fully embraces Trump's argument that he is the victim of a witch hunt. That's been the core of Todd Blanche's legal argument for his entire association with Donald Trump.

The dish of attorney has turned what is actually a completely political issue into a political prosecution. There is no daylight between the two on that issue. The legal argument and the political argument are completely one.

“And what is so important about those briefs is when you file them, even if we'd like”

campaign documents, they set in motion a clock and a judge has to rule and it takes time and what we all remember from that period is that led by Blanche, Trump's legal team

delays these two federal cases week after week, month after month, and ultimately, they

do run out the clock. I mean, it doesn't seem like it's a super sophisticated strategy, but it works. Ultimately, Trump resuscitates his political career, uses these indictments as the fuel for his second successful presidential campaign, and he gets re-elected and the cases get thrown out.

Right, because as we would all learn during this period, federal government cannot indict a setting president, so these cases just fall away. That's right. And all of a sudden, this big bet that Todd Blanche made a couple of years earlier is about to pay off.

We'll do a back. This is Maurice Shema, host of the last 12 weeks, a new podcast from Serial Productions, The Marshall Project, and the New York Times. A couple of years back, I got an email from a defense lawyer, who wanted me to write about his client.

The client, David Wood, was on death row in Texas, had been there for more than 30 years. The lawyer was writing because David Wood had lost all of his appeals. He was set to be executed. The lawyer's plan to stop the execution was to try and prove something that nobody had successfully done in three decades that one of Texas's most notorious serial killers was actually innocent.

It wasn't that the lawyers didn't have a case to make. I know two people fabricated testimony to get a guy executed. It's just that they had so little time to make it. The last 12 weeks, listen wherever you get your podcasts. Glenn, talk us through exactly how this bet that Blanche had made to align himself with Trump

at Trump's lowest point starts to pay off once Trump is back in the White House. Well, Blanche wants a top job at DOJ. He wants the top job at DOJ. He doesn't get it, but instead he gets the position of deputy attorney general, which

is probably the most powerful position in Washington that people don't know about.

He runs the day-to-day operations of the department and he's particularly powerful because his boss is so weak. Pam Bondi is a second choice attorney general. She's the former AJ and Florida, and she's just not prepared for the job. And Blanche winds up having even more power than most deputy attorney generals have.

“And from the very beginning, he and his right handman, Emil Bovae, begin in acting key elements”

of Trump's plan. It's in foremost, it involves demoting, marginalizing, and flat out firing, career staff

that flagged employees as being anti-Trump. Right, they start to fire anyone who touched the classified documents, investigation, or the January 6th investigation. They start seeking out revenge inside the Department of Justice.

Yeah, the first six weeks of Blanche's tenure was just this torrent of stories that we wrote

about teams being fired.

“The National Security Division, one of the most important parts of the department, was”

essentially dismantled the Public Integrity Unit, which investigates public corruption, was the core of Jack Smith's team, was reduced from 30 to 2 staffers under Blanche's initial leadership. Blanche saw this as a nest of vipers, and he imbibed the arguments that he made in court. So he had very little sympathy for most of the people who worked for him, so he completely

reshaped the department, and really isolated the attorney general and the politically appointed leadership from the rest of the building. So he creates this environment straight out of the box. Beyond cleaning house at the Department of Justice, how is Blanche advising the president

as he's starting to test the bounds of the law in those first weeks and months of the

second term? Basically what his job quickly evolves into is fielding these demands from the White House and from MAGA folks outside of the building to go after Trump's enemies or people who have gone after Republicans in the past, or to protect people who they perceived as being persecuted by the Biden administration.

So there's this massive energy coming at Blanche, a demands for him to do things, and Pam Bondi as well, and Blanche has to curate these things, and this is where things get really hairy, and Blanche occupies this middle role where he is in the broad sense committed both publicly and privately to executing Trump's desire to investigate these people. While at the same time putting on his hat as a prosecutor, deferring to his own experience

and to some extent deferring to the career staff, and determining what moves are legal, what moves are practical, and what can't be done, and very quickly Blanche falls into a pattern of essentially acting as an adviser to Trump of saying, "You could try to do this legally, but your chances of succeeding in court are minimal." And the biggest example of this, the one that still looms large over the department, was

the decision to prosecute Latisha James, the New York State Attorney General, and James Komi, the former FBI director, on various charges in Northern Virginia, Blanche advises the president and the president's staff that this is not a good idea.

“Right, just to remind people, Latisha James is indicted on, I believe, more good fraud.”

James Komi, former FBI director, is indicted for allegedly lying to Congress. Right. Blanche tells the president, "Look, you could do this. I'm not saying that it is outside of your authority to do, but that your chances of succeeding with the jury, grand jury, and Virginia are very low, and your chances of getting an actual

conviction are practically zero." Right. And he would know because he's a former criminal defense attorney. Exactly. He's essentially giving Trump the kind of no BS advice that he gave him as a defense attorney.

And as Blanche learned, then, you know, you could lead the horse to water, right? But sometimes the horse wants to indict the former FBI director, even if the case is in very strong. As we know, without getting into the gritty details here, the whole thing blows up, and Blanche's initial advice is proven to be right.

Hmm, not observed, but ultimately correct. Exactly. We should probably note, even though it now sounds quaint, that this is not the typical relationship a president has to senior figures at the Department of Justice. There has, in the past, been a huge amount of independence and respect for the Department

of Justice as a basically independent body within these executive branch, what you're describing is a version of this relationship in which there's no barrier between the two any longer. And they're basically working hand in hand. We've had powerful attorneys general, but this is an entirely different situation. So this view that Trump has of the Justice Department, being an extension of his will,

and Blanche's essential acquiescence to that model, are completely new in terms of the

annals of the Department.

“Glenn, what you're describing helps, I think, to explain why Republican senators, who are”

now being asked to confirm Todd Blanche as an ex- attorney general, have some real questions.

of Justice, they see these failed overreaching, strained prosecutions of Trump's enemies,

and they have some real concerns. Michael, we have not even talked about the Jeffrey Epstein files yet, which is a looming huge question. Blanche along with Pam Bondi, we've reported were the ones who went to Donald Trump to tell him precisely how many times, and in what context he was mentioned in these files.

“So he's playing this very ambiguous back and forth for all in the Epstein files, right?”

That's going to be a big issue. I'm sure he's going to get grilled on it in the hearing. But look, I think his big selling point to Republicans is some version of I am the least bad option you could possibly have as deputy attorney general, and is acting attorney general for the past couple of months, forget my public statements quietly behind the scenes, I'm

working the phones, I'm keeping a lot of really bad things from happening. The way they're true to that, I think there is some element of truth to that. He's one of the most ambiguous hard to pin down characters I've ever covered, right? He seems different things at different times, I think because he's a man who's very much in the middle here.

He is, for instance, the guy who seems to have talked Donald Trump out of going after Jerome Powell, the former Fed chair, for these excessive renovations at the Fed headquarters, that would have put a major, major wedge between Trump and Senate Republicans who did not want to see that kind of destabilization.

Right, and ultimately Trump drops that investigation, but he did start it exactly.

“And inside the department, I think probably one of the most interesting dynamics has been”

blanches conflict with a character by the name of Ed Martin, who was inserted by the White House into the Justice Department to run this so-called anti-weaponization working group, which was created essentially to investigate all these grievances that Magga and Trump had about the Biden administration. We were looking into prosecution of the J. Sixers, alleged anti-Christian and anti-Catholic

bias and a whole host of other issues. Martin is a guy who believes in naming and shaming people, that a legitimate use of the Justice Department isn't just to prosecute and investigate, it is to just get people's names out there in public in a political way so that they're embarrassed and that they have to lawyer up.

We've obtained some emails over the last couple of days that show this tension between blanch and Martin. We know they had clashed over the months, but what we didn't really know was blanched telling Martin, look, you're not abiding by Justice Department rules, you're talking publicly about grand jury testimony.

This is not cool, I don't want you out there doing that, and eventually earlier this year, blanched sideline Ed Martin.

“So that I think is the biggest data point that blanch has, in fact, exercised something”

of a moderating influence. And then of course, there is the anti-weaponization fund, blanched tried to play something of a moderating role on that one too, right? He's attempted to walk it back a bit after the political backlash to kind of show Trump

that this is not something that is ultimately going to work out for the administration.

But then again, you get that contradiction. He could have refused to sign off on it in the first place, right? A lot of stuff has gotten past him, and there is no question that the department has far less autonomy and independence than at any point in its history. So where do things currently stand as blanch makes the case to send it Republicans that

things could be worse? They could be much worse. And these Republicans say, well, thank you for not making them perhaps worse, but we don't like a lot of what we're seeing. We didn't like the fact that the weaponization fund got all the way to birth.

We don't like some of the prosecutions we're seeing. What does that mean for the math of confirmation? Well, it's a tricky dynamic for blanch. It only takes one Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote against blanch to essentially kill the nomination by boxing it up in committee.

Right now there are a couple of committee members who have expressed some skepticism about blanch. Right now, I would say the main Republican who could present a serious problem is John Kornin from Texas, who was ousted in his primary and really has nothing left to lose. Right, because Trump has the reason he got ousted, Trump turned against him because Kornin

was insufficiently enthusiastic in endorsing him in 2024.

He is a senator with a capital S, right?

“And he was very, very hostile to the notion of the creation of the anti-weaponization”

from, but more to the point there was a second deal signed by blanch that would essentially grant immunity to Donald Trump and his family for tax investigations. And that appears to be a big sticking point for John Kornin, who has refused to commit to supporting blanch prior to the hearing and he's refused to even say that he's leaning towards blanch, that could prove to be a very big problem for blanch if he can't resolve

that issue. Right, because that's something that blanch has not backed down from. Unlike the weaponization fund where blanch concedes, this isn't going to happen, maybe it wasn't a good idea.

He has never backed away from this IRS immunity deal.

That's right, because Trump really cares about this. If he gets out of the committee, he still has to get confirmed by the larger Senate. And you know, that'll happen a month, a month and a half from now, dynamics of shifting really, really fast and there are a couple of other senators who could be no votes. Cassidy, another lame duck senator from Louisiana, has shown an inclination to buck the

administration. And then you get Lisa McCalski and Alaska, who is very independent and very critical of the Trump administration. She's also been non-committal. So there's a lot of game here left to play.

Hmm.

“So what happens to Todd Blanch if the Senate doesn't confirm him?”

He has been the acting attorney general for quite a while now. Does he just remain that way? What happens? Under the general guidelines in the law, Blanch can remain pretty much indefinitely as acting attorney general until Donald Trump leaves office.

But that said, it is very important to Todd Blanch personally to get to the apex of this organization through a Senate confirmation. And in terms of the general legitimacy and the capacity to control your own government, it is really important as a token of a president who sees his power as the central facet of his political life to get this thing done.

Through a Senate that he, again, views as he does, Todd Blanch, as essentially, help mates and employees. Hmm.

“So when we think about the bet that Blanch made early on to go all in with Trump and how”

yes, it is certainly paid off in the sense that Trump won a second term in Blanch got to

be at the Department of Justice, the final payoff for Blanch is Senate confirmation. And all the things he has to do to keep the president happy may make it very hard for him to get these Senate Republicans to give him that final payoff. That's the central tension of being the attorney general in Trump's second term. You know, that's the big paradox.

What Blanch is had to do to get this nomination, get Trump's support, might be the very thing that undermines his capacity to be confirmed. Because this is the justice department, even after everything that has happened in the last year and a half, there is the expectation among senators, even Republicans who support Donald Trump, that this department provides a sense of legitimacy is a bulwark for rule

of law and should not be undermined and degraded in the way that some of these Republicans believe that it already has been. But Blanch, thank you very much. Great talking to you.

We'll do it back here's what else he need to know today.

So I thought I would just share a little bit about how the threats affected me and my family personally. And they have required me to, I might, might children to think about and see things that children should not have to see or think about. In unusually personal testimony on Tuesday, two members of the Supreme Court, justices

Elena Kagan and Amy Coney Barrett, answered questions from Congress about the courts request for millions of dollars more in security to protect the justices at work and at home. For some of us, those threats have come very close and all of us live with the knowledge that they may again materialize. Kagan told lawmakers that the court expects a 38% increase in threats this year, following

a 25% increase last year. And the Times reports that the Trump administration has ordered federal immigration officers

those stops resulted in two shooting deaths over the past week.

“One of those deaths occurred in Texas, the other in Maine.”

Today's episode was produced by Muge Zadee, Eric Crabki, Alex Stern and Olivia Nat.

It was edited by Rachel Quester and Rob Zipko, with help from Mark George.

“The Times' music by Marian Lazzotto, Rowie Niesto, Brad Fisher and Diane Wong, our theme music is by Wonderland.”

This episode was engineered by Alyssa Moxley.

That's it for the Daily. I'm Michael Babar, see you tomorrow. I'm Gilbert Cruz, this week on the Book Review podcast author and Placicist Madeline Miller gives us a primer on the Odyssey. They are flawed characters who try and fail and try again, who get angry and make mistakes.

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