Blanche Is as Bad as We Feared He Would Be

In just his first week in office, Attorney General Todd Blanche has inflicted more damage on the norms and traditions of the Department of Justice than any Attorney General in the DOJ’s history.

I don’t say this lightly, and I’m not ignoring the competition. John Mitchell ran Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and went to federal prison for it. Mitchell Palmer used the Department to round up and deport thousands of people for their politics during the First Red Scare. During the Harding administration, Harry Daugherty turned the Department into a vehicle for graft, his cronies selling pardons and immunities like so many indulgences, earning the DOJ the nickname “the Department of Easy Virtue.” And of course Pam Bondi started the Department on its current steep downward path.

Damaging deeds all, but none of these AG’s was suggesting that the conduct was exemplary. Blanche, by contrast, has openly taken a blowtorch to standards that have been articles of faith at the DOJ for 50 years. Puffed up with his confirmation, he’s taken on a renewed cockiness—arrogance, really—and proclaimed his and Donald Trump’s perverted account of the attorney general as the new norm.

Consider these five separate betrayals of the Department’s ideals. All in the first week in office.

1. Refusal to Pledge Independence from Trump

Asked by Kristen Welker on Meet the Press whether he could pledge that the Justice Department would always act independently of the White House, Blanche was combative: “No, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that.”

That gratuitous added sentence disparages the mindset of every attorney general for the last fifty years and more. All of them lived by the very pledge he now declares inappropriate, under administrations of both parties. Edward Levi, whom Gerald Ford appointed in 1975 precisely to rebuild a Department gutted by a president who thought it belonged to him, made the point a theme of his tenure: nothing, he said, could more imperil the goals we hold dear “than our failure to make clear by words and deed that our law is not an instrument of partisan purpose.”

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s own first attorney general, swore that the Department’s actions “will not be improperly influenced by political considerations,” and that it “can never be used to retaliate politically against opponents.”

Michael Mukasey, the conservative Republican AG brought in by President George W. Bush in 2007 to clean up the U.S. Attorney firing scandal, told the Senate that any White House official called about a case would get two phone numbers and nothing else—and that staff who discussed cases with political actors would be fired. Merrick Garland put the principle most concisely at his confirmation hearing: “I am not the president’s lawyer. I am the United States’ lawyer.”

Blanche has now tarred them all as misguided and straightlaced.

2. Attending a Political Rally

Days after being sworn in, Blanche stood at the Nassau County Police Academy—flanked by uniformed officers—and warmed up a crowd for a Trump-endorsed candidate for governor of New York, praising Bruce Blakeman for doing “everything we need him to do.” No attorney general in at least a hundred years has appeared at a political rally for a candidate; I suspect none would even have entertained the idea.

The conduct can only undermine public confidence in his impartiality. It was enough to silence the senator whose vote secured his confirmation: pressed by a reporter about the rally, Senator Bill Cassidy went quiet, then meekly pleaded that he “never heard anything about that rally until this very minute.”

3. Speech in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice

On Thursday, August 13, Blanche delivered a speech in the DOJ’s Great Hall to a workforce described in news reports as depleted and bruised by a year of firings. He served up pieties that surely left Department veterans cold, if not revolted, assuring them the Department would uphold the law “without fear or favor”—as solid a capsule description of the Department’s mission as there is.

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But Blanche’s assurances could not be more empty. His tenure has been marked, and by every indication will continue to be, by justice meted out with both fear—the unwarranted prosecution of political enemies—and favor—the sweetheart treatment of January 6 defendants and other Trump allies.

Delivered to the Department’s own workers, the phony bromides landed worse still. Blanche has personally spent a year presiding over the firing of prosecutors for the political sin of doing their jobs.

4. Public Criticism of Court Decisions

On Fox News Sunday, after the D.C. Circuit had ordered construction of the president’s ballroom halted for want of congressional approval, Blanche waved the ruling away: “We don’t believe we have to go to Congress. We believe Congress has already given us the authority to do what we’re doing.” That sharply undermined two traditions at once: an attorney general does not litigate a pending case from a television studio, and he does not treat a federal appeals court’s ruling as a talking point rather than an order to be obeyed.

The matter was, at that very moment, before the Supreme Court on the administration’s own emergency application—a case Blanche’s own solicitor general was trying to win—after an appellate majority found no instance in American history of a president unilaterally demolishing substantial portions of the White House with privately collected funds. An attorney general with any institutional sense says nothing while a case is before the Justices. Blanche went on television to argue it.

5. Whitewashing Trump’s Record

Finally, there is the ludicrous load of crap Blanche volunteered on Meet the Press. Asked what he would do if the president directed him to cross an ethical or legal line, he would not give the one-word answer the moment called for. He did not say no. He dodged into a guarantee no honest person could make: “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”

What a whopper, from the lips of the chief federal law-enforcement office in the land. Appearances at political rallies are unethical; reprisal prosecutions are illegal.

Trump has insisted on bringing cases against his enemies, and Blanche has championed his right to do so; the president has forced out those who moved too slowly—his previous Attorney General Pam Bondi, and more recently his own U.S. Attorneys—for failing to deliver his enemies’ heads on a plate.

Consider the Reflecting Pool. Trump’s own hand-picked U.S. Attorney in Washington, Jeanine Pirro, dropped the felony case against Olympic canoeist David Hearn after her office concluded that the damage had come from a botched contractor installation, not vandalism—telling the court, in unusual detail, that the indictment had been ill-informed. The president erupted, saying Pirro had “choked” and “folded like an umbrella,” and pressed for the case to be revived; the White House then asked the Department to consider a fresh prosecution of a man his own prosecutor had just cleared.

It gets worse. On September 20, Trump posted on Truth Social that James Comey, Adam Schiff, and Letitia James were “all guilty as hell” and that “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” A hand-picked loyalist secured the Comey indictment days later, and in open court the government’s own advocate conceded that if the president’s post “is not direction to prosecute, I’d be really at a loss to say what it is.” As would anyone.

Blanche’s blithe assurance is a classic authoritarian move, one we have seen from Trump himself again and again over the last twenty months: don’t merely lie; proclaim the exact opposite of the truth, and stand your ground shamelessly.

Mitchell, Palmer, and Daugherty damaged the Department of Justice by what they did as attorney general, but none tried to change what it was. Blanche is attacking the institution at its foundations in broad daylight, sawing away at the principles it was built on and requiring its basic mission. That is why his first week belongs in a shameful category of its own.

Talk to you later.

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