TODD BLANCHE WAS DONALD TRUMP’S personal attorney, so it was natural that, when he was elevated to attorney general, a journalist asked whether he would “pledge that the Justice Department will always act independently of the White House?”
The correct answer to such a question is obvious. The Justice Department and I are committed to the impartial administration of justice. We will always make prosecution decisions based solely upon the facts and the law after a fair evaluation of the evidence.
But Blanche said something a little different.
No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that. The president, I mean, if I were to pledge I will be independent of the White House, what that means is that if President Trump says, ‘I want the Department of Justice to go after every violent criminal in this country,’ which is what he has said, what you’re saying to me is I should say, ‘No, sir, I’m not going to do it.’
What jumps out first about Blanche’s answer is the blithe refusal even to mouth (however disingenuously) the expected platitude. This is the Trumpian way. They don’t just break the rules behind closed doors; they shatter the rules in broad daylight. It’s not enough, for example, that the Trump Justice Department is denying resources to the team that investigates and prosecutes foreign corrupt practices; Trump issued an executive order pausing all such prosecutions. So it’s not news that Trump’s new attorney general will fail to seek impartial justice, but the refusal to even feign regard for impartial justice is new.
The substance of Blanche’s justification is also fatuous. Pledging to act independently of the White House doesn’t mean acting in every instance in direct opposition to the president. That’s absurd, and it’s not what independence requires. Nor could the president order the attorney general to “go after every violent criminal in this country,” since more than 98 percent of violent crimes are state offenses, not federal ones, and in any case the combined forces of the state and federal governments don’t have the resources to go after every violent criminal.
The Bulwark is about three things: Factual reporting, honest analysis and commentary, and pro-democracy community. Join us.
So much for deflection. The coffee-spitting moment came later, when Blanche was asked whether he would carry out an order that “crossed a legal or ethical line” and he proclaimed that “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or legal—or illegal. He never has. He never will.”
Let’s let the Freudian slip pass, but in fact the president had demanded that the Justice Department do something unethical that very week—namely, reconsider the decision to drop spurious vandalism charges against David Hearn. Jeanine Pirro’s own motion to the court acknowledged that the original indictment was based upon false information provided by the Department of the Interior. Nevertheless, President Trump fumed that Pirro had “choked.” This week we learned that she was convening a special grand jury for some unknown purpose. If I were Hearn, I’d keep my lawyer close.
And that perversion of justice is only a ripple in the flood of plainly politicized acts and forbearances by this administration. This is a president who sent a DM to his previous attorney general demanding the prosecution of his political opponents. It’s hard to think of how you could more comprehensively upend the idea of blind justice.
Trump’s apologists do have a valid point when they note that the Manhattan DA’s case against Trump in the Stormy Daniels case was also a form of lawfare. I said at the time that the case was flimsy and almost certainly would never have been brought if Trump were not the target. Trump’s flagrant lawbreaking did present a quandary: How do you hold him responsible for his crimes without unintentionally validating the idea in the minds of his supporters that all justice is corruptly motivated?
There are no easy answers. Still, the Bragg prosecution was a local case, not the federal government seeking to punish a political foe. Ditto for the civil case Letitia James brought. At the federal level, Attorney General Merrick Garland was actually extremely reluctant to pursue federal charges against Trump despite the gravity of his conduct before and on January 6th. It was only after Trump announced his re-election bid that Garland felt compelled to appoint a special prosecutor (precisely to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest).
Nor is it the case that President Biden’s administration used the Justice Department to settle political scores. To repeat, Garland was widely criticized for moving slowly against Trump’s obvious lawbreaking in the Mar-a-Lago documents case as well as the January 6th insurrection. One can understand his hesitation. One administration prosecuting another opens the possibility of a dangerous tit-for-tat, but whatever your view about the wisdom of going slow against Trump, it’s preposterous to “whatabout” this. Under Garland’s leadership, the Department brought indictments against Rep. Henry Cuellar, Sen. Bob Menendez, former Rep. TJ Cox, Illinois Speaker Michael Madigan, Mayor Eric Adams (and we know how that turned out when Trump returned), former Mayor Andrew Gillum, and Hunter Biden—Democrats all.
Trump’s second-term Department of Justice, by contrast, has been a nonstop cavalcade of corruption, featuring blatantly political prosecutions, attempted prosecutions, or investigations of Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Miles Taylor, Christopher Krebs, James Comey, “sandwich guy,” Adam Schiff, Letitia James, Kilmar Ábrego García, Alex Padilla, John Brennan, John Bolton, Sean Dunn, Ras Baraka, Jacob Frey, anti-ICE protesters in Minnesota, including the widow of Renée Good, and many more.
Biden made poor decisions in pardoning his family at the end, but that was trivial compared with Trump’s mass pardons for the January 6th criminals; his pardons for cronies, donors, and other corrupt public figures; his firings of any official who participated in the January 6th or Mar-a-Lago investigations; his kid-glove treatment of Ghislaine Maxwell; and of course, his putrid attempt to create a $1.8 billion slush fund for so-called “victims of lawfare” along with a get-out-of-jail-free card for Trump and his insatiable family regarding past tax evasion.
The aptly named Blanche (because he should, but doesn’t, blush) was along for all of it. He personally visited Maxwell in prison and has yet to provide an explanation for that highly unusual visit, nor for her promotion to a more comfortable prison. He was at the Department of Justice as 3,400 lawyers resigned in protest rather than engage in the kinds of unethical and unprofessional conduct Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche were demanding. He has defended with a straight face James Comey’s indictment for threatening the president with an Instagram photo of seashells.
This ethical flexibility was enough to make even some Republican senators hesitate about confirming him. But in the end, all but Collins and Murkowski voted yes, presumably because they fear that if it’s not Blanche it will be someone even worse. Thus does Trump extort his party—by threatening to get even dirtier. But this tactic only succeeds because of learned helplessness by Republican officeholders. In fact, when Trump gets pushback, he backs down. Ask Iran. Or consider the first utterly horrific attorney general candidate he proposed after winning the 2024 election, Matt Gaetz. Enough Republicans balked that Trump withdrew his name. He didn’t nominate someone even worse after that (admittedly a tall order). He went with Pam Bondi, a smidge less awful.
It seems the tactic of standing up to Trump is just crazy enough to work. But, no, the GOP has not learned that lesson. Republicans have chosen spinelessness instead. Even after a decade of this, I still cannot understand why.
Want to comment? Join Bulwark+
Login