Donald Trump has tapped three of his personal criminal defense lawyers for top roles at the Department of Justice, underscoring how the president-elect is shaping the nation’s top law enforcement agency to serve his interests.
Trump announced on Thursday he was nominating Todd Blanche and Emil Bove to be the US deputy attorney general and the principal associate deputy attorney general respectively. Bove will serve as the acting deputy attorney general while Blanche is awaiting confirmation to the second-highest role in the justice department.
Trump has long made it clear he sees the role of the justice department as to defend him, and frequently lashed out at Jeff Sessions, one of his attorneys general during his first term, for not doing enough to protect him amid Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference. While the justice department is led by political appointees who set its priorities, a hallmark of the agency is its political independence – it is supposed to enforce the laws of the United States without political considerations.
Blanche and Bove, both former federal prosecutors, defended Trump in the New York hush-money case as well as the federal election subversion cases against him. During Trump’s weeks-long hush-money trial earlier this year, both men seemed to direct their arguments as much to Trump as to the jury, understanding that their goal was to defend Trump in the public eye as much as in a courtroom.
The president-elect also announced he was nominating Dean John Sauer, who successfully convinced the supreme court that Trump and other presidents were entitled to presidential immunity for official acts, to be the solicitor general. The solicitor general represents the United States government in cases before the US supreme court and has been called the “10th justice” on the court. Sauer is a former solicitor general of Missouri, who infamously said during an oral argument earlier this year it would be hypothetically legal for the president to order a Seal team to assassinate a political rival.
Taken in concert with his nomination of Matt Gaetz, a Florida congressman who is a fierce Trump loyalist, the picks show that Trump is filling the justice department with officials who will have few qualms about carrying out his requests. Trump has pledged to use the department to prosecute political enemies, a tactic deployed by dictators.
“These selections show Donald Trump intends to weaponize the justice department to seek vengeance,” said Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who is the outgoing chair of the Senate judiciary committee. “Donald Trump viewed the justice department as his personal law firm during his first term, and these selections – his personal attorneys – are poised to do his bidding.
“The American people deserve a justice department that fights for equal justice under the law. This isn’t it.”
During his first term, the justice department played a key role in trying to check some of Trump’s most authoritarian efforts. Top officials threatened to resign en masse after the 2020 election, when Trump and an ally in the department, Jeffrey Clark, pushed to have the department declare there was mass voter fraud. Sessions enraged Trump by appointing Mueller to investigate contacts with Russian interference during the first presidential election.
Trump on Thursday also nominated Jay Clayton, the former chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, to be the US attorney for the southern district of New York. That role is one of the most prized in the justice department because it oversees Wall Street and has traditionally brought some of the nation’s most high-profile cases. (It is currently handling the corruption case against Eric Adams and the sex-trafficking case against Sean “Diddy” Combs, among others.)
Clayton was nearly installed in the job in 2020 after the then attorney general, William Barr, forced out Geoffrey Berman, who was overseeing investigations of several people close to Trump. Berman’s removal was widely seen as political interference and he initially refused to step down, only agreeing to do so once he was assured that his deputy would take over the role. Clayton must still be confirmed by the Senate.
