Attorney General Pam Bondi is out, baby. And now, it’s Todd time.
Todd Blanche, current deputy attorney general and now incoming acting attorney general, is—like so many others—one of President Donald Trump’s former criminal defense attorneys. He represented Trump in the classified documents case, the Jan. 6 case, and the hush money New York State case. That last one didn’t work out so well for Trump.
Attorney General Pam Bondi was ousted on April 2.
And since being rewarded with a job at the Department of Justice, Blanche has really made a name for himself. Not a good name, but a name nonetheless.
Let’s start with Blanche’s very normal and cool and lowkey view of federal judges. During the Federalist Society conference last year, Blanche declared a “war” against the judiciary and called on baby lawyers to join him in fighting “activist judges.”
You see, Blanche doesn’t really believe that judges should be able to stop Trump—and that’s not hyperbole.
At the same conference, he complained about “what a travesty it is when you have an individual judge be able to stop an entire operation or an entire administrative policy that’s constitutional and allowed just because he or she chooses to do so.”
That stupid Constitution with its stupid checks and balances, am I right?
Related | Pam Bondi fired
This is, suffice to say, a very unique view of the separation of powers. Essentially, what Blanche is saying is that Trump and the DOJ get to say whether something is constitutional, and if they do, judges can’t stop it.
Of course, the way it works in the real world is that only the judicial branch gets to interpret laws and determine their constitutionality. Lawyers learn that in their first week of law school when they read Marbury v. Madison. Maybe Blanche was sick that day?
Todd Blanche, the new acting attorney general, was President Donald Trump’s criminal defense attorney in several cases.
Blanche’s understanding of the First Amendment is similarly unique, and by “unique” I mean comically wrong. He’s convinced that he could bring racketeering charges against people who protest Trump while he’s “trying to enjoy dinner and accost him with vile words.”
Okay … maybe Blanche was out sick for the entirety of law school?
Blanche is also the face of the DOJ’s “fuck you, make me” strategy in releasing the Epstein files. Well, he’s more the face of not releasing them.
It was Blanche who went on Fox in January to blithely declare that the whole Epstein thing was done, leave him alone already. And, oh, by the way, they’re holding back 50%—3 million files!—because they’re not “responsive.”
Sure, the Epstein Files Transparency Act doesn’t allow for that, but it isn’t like Blanche cares. He knows his job is to protect Trump, not to follow the law. So he helpfully met with Epstein associate and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell for a private little chat that somehow didn’t provide any meaningful information but did net Maxwell a move to a lower-security prison.
When he’s not running interference to make sure no one figures out how much his boss and former client is implicated in the Epstein files, he’s busy orchestrating vindictive prosecutions.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to El Salvador in March 2025, but the Trump administration refused to bring him back despite court orders to do so. And when Abrego Garcia was finally returned, the DOJ indicted him on wildly inflated human trafficking claims.
A cartoon by Mike Luckovich.
The administration insisted that prosecutors in Tennessee coincidentally decided out of the blue to prosecute Abrego Garcia over a two-year-old traffic stop, so how could you possibly think the criminal prosecution was invented only after the court ordered his return?
Well, maybe because Blanche literally went on Fox to boast that the DOJ started criminally investigating Abrego Garcia only after a judge ruled that the administration couldn’t deport him.
Blanche also isn’t really into woke shit like ethics agreements or conflict-of-interest rules, which would explain why he had no problem ordering a shutdown of DOJ crypto investigations while holding more than $150,000 in crypto—that he’d already signed an ethics agreement to dispose of.
That loose grip on morals is why it seems likely that Blanche will also happily approve Trump’s demand that the government give him $230 million for the pain and suffering he endured while being investigated for the crimes he committed—yes, the ones in the cases that Blanche represented.
In short, Blanche is just a louder, taller, scowlier version of Bondi. Same as it ever was.
