The man set to lead the Department of Justice after Pam Bondi’s departure mounted the defense of Donald Trump through his criminal prosecutions and the weeks-long hush money trial that led to the first ever conviction of a president.
Todd Blanche, who Trump appointed as deputy attorney general, will take on the role of acting attorney general following Bondi’s ousting.
Bondi will transfer duties of the Office of Attorney General to Blanche over the next month before she leaves the Trump administration for what she called “an important private secretary role.”
Blanche — who steered Trump’s defense in courtrooms in New York, Florida, and Washington D.C. — was sworn into the No. 2 role at the Justice Department just weeks after he appeared alongside Trump on a screen inside a Manhattan criminal courtroom, where a judge presided over the first-ever criminal sentencing of a president in U.S. history.
“Pam Bondi led this Department with strength and conviction and I’m grateful for her leadership and friendship,” Blanche said in a statement. “Thank you to President Trump for the trust and the opportunity to serve as Acting Attorney General. We will continue backing the blue, enforcing the law, and doing everything in our power to keep America safe.”
Blanche is among several former personal attorneys to the president, including Bondi, who joined the Trump administration in roles that have been used to strike at his political opponents and unwind federal investigations that once targeted Trump.
Emil Bove, another of Trump’s criminal defense attorneys in his so-called hush money case, served as principal deputy attorney general before Trump nominated him to serve as a federal appellate court judge.
D. John Sauer, who argued at the Supreme Court for Trump’s “immunity” from criminal prosecution for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss, is now the government’s top lawyer
Other former Trump-linked lawyers — including Harmeet Dhillon, now the chief of the Justice Department’s storied Civil Rights Division, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, and former U.S. Attorneys Alina Habba and Lindsey Halligan, among others — were also rewarded with key roles in the administration after spending years defending the president through a minefield of legal challenges.
Inside the Justice Department, Blanche has remained steadfast in his support of his former client.
Last year, he dismissed Erez Reuveni, the acting deputy director of the Office of Immigration Litigation, after he admitted in court that Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia — whose high-profile case has been at the center of the Trump administration’s mass deportation efforts — was wrongly removed from the country.
He also disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, was tapped to serve as the acting librarian of Congress, and suggested that anti-Trump protesters who interrupted the president’s dinner should face federal racketeering charges.
Last month, while speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Blanche boasted that the Justice Department “cleaned up shop” after firing dozens of career prosecutors and federal agents who were involved in the investigations against the man he was defending in court.
“There is not a single man or woman with a gun — federal agent — still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump,” he said.
But his roles in the investigations surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, and the Justice Department’s legally required release of documents stemming from the sex offender’s cases, have come under intense scrutiny from both Democrats and Republicans.
Last summer, he signed off on a memo stating that there is “no basis” to release any more materials from the federal government’s investigations, and that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”
In July, he interviewed Epstein’s longtime accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell from federal prison. Maxwell, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison after she was convicted of trafficking young women and girls, said she “never saw” Trump doing anything “inappropriate” during her wide-ranging interview.
She was later transferred to a lower-security prison in Texas.
Blanche — a veteran of several prestigious white-shoe firms and a former federal prosecutor in the U.S. the Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York — formed his own firm, Blanche Law, the same month Trump was arraigned on criminal charges in Manhattan. Blanche spent the next two years defending the president in various courtrooms.
On May 30, 2024, a unanimous jury convicted Trump on all 34 counts of falsifying business records in connection with a scheme to silence adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose story about having sex with Trump threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign.
Trump’s then-attorney Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 for the rights to her story; Trump reimbursed Cohen in a series of checks, some of which were cut from the White House, according to court records and testimony.
Those reimbursements were falsely recorded in accounting records as “legal expenses,” fulfilling a conspiracy to unlawfully influence the 2016 presidential election, according to prosecutors.
Throughout the trial, Blanche dutifully appeared next to Trump during informal press conferences to camera crews and reporters in the courthouse hallway.
Blanche also represented Trump throughout a federal criminal case alleging a vast conspiracy to undermine the results of the 2020 election and another involving the president’s allegedly unlawful possession of classified materials hoarded inside his Mar-a-Lago residence.
Former special counsel Jack Smith closed those cases after Trump’s election, and a federal judge — also appointed by Trump — has blocked the release of Smith's final report on his findings in the Mar-a-Lago investigation. The Justice Department has refused to publish it.
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