Todd Blanche Takes on Doj’s Top Job and the Burden of Trump’s Expectations

The Washington Post

15:08 JST, April 4, 2026

As Todd Blanche takes charge of the Justice Department over the coming weeks, he’ll come armed with a deeper history with President Donald Trump than any prior occupant to serve in that role under the famously mercurial president.

Blanche, the president’s former personal attorney, stood by his side leading the defense when Trump faced prosecutions during his years out of office, including some brought by the Justice Department. He impressed the once and future president during that period, even after Trump was convicted in one of those cases.

But their history might not be enough.

In his new role as acting attorney general, Blanche will inherit many of the same pressures that undid his predecessor, Pam Bondi – namely, the president’s desire to see his political enemies put on trial. And Blanche will face the same obstacles to success, including courts and grand juries that have rejected the department’s efforts so far to prosecute the president’s foes.

Hours after Trump announced his decision Thursday to oust Bondi and have Blanche temporarily take over her position, the 51-year-old former federal prosecutor expressed confidence in his ability to do the job.

In a Fox News interview, Blanche underscored his sympathy for the president’s belief that the Justice Department unfairly targeted Trump and conservatives during President Joe Biden’s term and that those involved should face consequences.

“The president is frustrated, everyone is frustrated,” he said. “What we saw happen for the last four years is unforgivable and can never happen again. So I don’t mind the frustration; I appreciate the frustration.”

Trump’s decision to dismiss Bondi followed months of disappointment from the president with her leadership and the pace – and limited success – of her efforts to charge his rivals.

As Bondi’s chief deputy, a role Blanche has held since last year, he has played an outsize role in many of the decisions that have left Trump vexed by the department’s progress to date. Still, many around the White House hold Blanche in high regard.

“He’s approachable,” said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to offer a candid impression of Blanche. “He doesn’t create an aura around him where you can’t say ‘Hey’ or have a conversation. He is known to be a thoughtful, smart person.”

At the Justice Department, employees greeted Blanche’s elevation Thursday with a measure of wary concern. Many had hoped, when Blanche first arrived at the department last year, that he would serve as a moderating check on Trump’s most extreme impulses.

Blanche spent eight years as a federal prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office earlier in his career, so they expected he would bring to his new job a recognition of the Justice Department’s traditional independence from the White House and respect for the rule of law.

But several current and former prosecutors said Friday that those expectations were dashed as they watched Blanche embrace Trump’s drive to transform the department in his image over the last year. They fear that as acting attorney general, Blanche will further acquiesce to Trump’s demands.

“President Trump will want better results, and it would make no sense for Blanche to take the job unless he intends to use the awesome power of federal prosecution to do President Trump’s bidding, the law be damned,” said Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at Fordham University’s law school.

“So whatever fidelity Blanche may have had to the rule of law in his earlier professional life, one can only assume that it has by now gone out the window,” Green said.

Trump lauded Blanche on Thursday as “a very talented and respected Legal Mind” – qualities the president was able to directly observe over years sitting by Blanche at defendant’s tables.

Blanche had been a partner at the law firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft when the opportunity to defend the then-former president arose in 2023. Trump was indicted that year in New York and accused of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to an adult-film actress. Blanche resigned from the firm, started his own practice and represented Trump.

He saw Trump through the New York trial, which ended in 2024 with him convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records.

During that period, 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 a legal strategy in both cases focused heavily on delaying the proceedings through procedural motions that tied up progress for months. He also displayed a knack for channeling the president’s sense of grievance as he sparred with judges and witnesses in court.

In the end, those tactics paid off. Legal arguments from Blanche’s team persuaded a federal judge in Florida, whom Trump appointed to the bench during his first term, to toss the classified documents case, citing issues with Smith’s appointment. After Trump won the 2024 presidential election, Smith dropped the election interference case.

For his efforts, Blanche was rewarded with the No. 2 position in the Justice Department – a nomination Trump announced within days of his reelection, even before he settled on naming Bondi as his attorney general.

But even in a Justice Department littered with former Trump lawyers – including Stanley E. Woodward Jr., the agency’s No. 3 official; Emil Bove, who served in a key role before Trump nominated him last year to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; Solicitor General D. John Sauer; and Alina Habba, a special adviser to the attorney general – Blanche’s influence stands out.

While overseeing day-to-day management of operations, he has taken on an increasingly public – and pugilistic – role as the face of the Justice Department in television interviews and conference appearances in recent months.

Speaking at a recent Federalist Society event, Blanche described the department as “at war” with “rogue activist judges” who have restrained many key planks of Trump’s agenda – a framing that sparked concern among many in the department who have long viewed the judiciary as an independent branch of government to be respected.

Blanche boasted at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas last month that in just over a year, the Justice Department had cleaned house of every prosecutor and FBI agent who had worked on the cases targeting Trump.

“There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” he said.

It was Blanche who publicly defended the department’s decision in January not to open a civil rights investigation into the fatal shooting of Renée Good in Minneapolis by federal immigration officers, saying that “there has to be circumstances or facts that warrant an investigation.”

He also took the lead in announcing the public release of millions of pages from the department’s files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. And in a highly unusual move, Blanche traveled to Florida to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s imprisoned ex-girlfriend, over several days last year.

Despite his rhetoric in public, some current and former Justice Department attorneys, speaking on the condition of anonymity, say signs have emerged behind the scenes of Blanche’s willingness to push back on the president.

When prosecutors faced demands for swift action in their classified documents case against John Bolton, the former national security adviser turned Trump critic, Blanche pushed last year to give them more time to shore up the evidence.

And in September, Blanche joined Bondi in advocating to save the job of Erik S. Siebert, the former U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, who had concluded that there was insufficient evidence to charge two other Trump targets – former FBI director James B. Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) – with crimes.

Trump ousted Siebert anyway, replacing him with Lindsey Halligan, who secured indictments against Comey and James. Those indictments were later thrown out by a judge who ruled that Halligan had been illegally appointed.

Despite those flashes of restraint, current and former employees say they have been alarmed by Blanche’s broader willingness to embrace the president’s push to bend the Justice Department to his will and worry how that will translate in his new role at the agency’s helm.

“It’s stunning,” said Mimi Rocah, who worked with Blanche as a young prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. Rocah said she had harbored early hopes that Blanche would prove to be a bulwark for the department’s history of independence.

“He not only disappointed” in his first year at the agency, she said, “he has caused mouth-gaping shock at how much he has not been that way.”

Trump has not indicated when he may nominate a replacement for Bondi, who posted on social media Thursday that she would work “over the next month” to transition out of the job.

But the most important metric of success Blanche faces in the interim may be his ability to deliver Trump results in the cases the president cares about most.

Grand juries in recent months have rejected efforts to reindict James and refused to charge six Democratic lawmakers in connection with a video in which they urged U.S. military members to resist illegal orders.

A federal judge also recently quashed a Justice Department subpoena sent to the Federal Reserve as part of an investigation of its chair, Jerome H. Powell, who has drawn Trump’s ire. The judge said that the government “produced essentially zero evidence to suspect Chair Powell of a crime.”

Investigations into several other Trump rivals – including former CIA director John Brennan and Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California) – remain underway. Attorneys for both men have denounced those probes as politically motivated and predicted that they, too, will fail because of a lack of evidence.

The Justice Department has also launched inquiries aimed at substantiating Trump’s long-held grievances over his 2020 election loss, which remains a central fixation for the president despite repeated audits and investigations that have found no evidence of widespread fraud sufficient to sway the results.

Blanche, in his Fox News interview Thursday, declined to discuss any specific probes or how he might approach those cases differently than Bondi did.

“The Department of Justice is working hard every day,” he said. “It was working hard yesterday, and we’re going to keep on working hard tomorrow.”