Todd Blanche Is Already Historically Awful
How Trump's pick to lead the Justice Department stacks up against the best and worst Attorneys General in U.S. history.
Todd Blanche should not and must not be confirmed as Attorney General. He is grossly unfit and manifestly unworthy. His confirmation would be a death knell for the rule of law in the United States.
Blanche still thinks he’s Donald Trump’s defense attorney. About his “boss,” he told the world, point blank, and unironically, “I love you, sir.” In his limited time as Acting AG, he has used the Justice Department as a vendetta machine, attempted to whitewash the nation’s history, and obstructed justice by withholding release of the Epstein Files. Not only that, but he’s an asshole of galactic proportions.
His nomination is an abomination.
The New York City Bar Association took the extreme step of writing a letter to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, urging the Senate to reject his nomination. “Mr. Blanche has taken actions that we believe make him unfit to lead an ethical and independent department of justice that is essential to our nation’s democracy,” the City Bar writes. “Mr. Blanche’s record—particularly the actions he has undertaken as Deputy Attorney General and Acting Attorney General—conclusively demonstrates his lack of commitment to the integrity, professionalism and independence that the Senate should require and the American people should expect of the highest law enforcement official in the land.”
Since joining the Justice Department on March 6, 2025, the City Bar points out, Blanche has:
abused the Department’s prosecutorial power through politically motivated prosecutions and investigations;
failed to respect the Constitutional rights of citizens and all other people present in the United States protesting widespread abuses by ICE and other customs officers;
placed loyalty to President Trump over commitment to the rule of law in the Epstein investigation and the “settlement” of Trump v. I.R.S.;
undermined the independence and integrity of the Department of Justice by, among other things, terminating or reassigning lawyers and others who participated in January 6 investigations or otherwise acted in a manner perceived to be disloyal to Mr. Trump; and
undermined public trust in the Department of Justice and the rule of law through conduct contrary to the Rules of Professional Conduct applicable to Mr. Blanche and the Department’s own Justice Manual.
As a result, in less than two years, the Department of Justice’s credibility with the courts and with the public, established over the course of decades, has been shattered.
Justice Connection, an organization made up of “former prosecutors, civil litigators, judges, FBI agents, national security experts, division heads, and communications specialists who served in components across DOJ, under both Republican and Democratic administrations,” and established to provide support to current and former Justice Department employees under assault by the Trump Administration, put out a fact sheet on Blanche’s deplorable record at DOJ. It is as exhaustive as it is damning:
Todd Blanche was confirmed as Deputy Attorney General on March 5, 2025, and became Acting Attorney General on April 2, 2026—but he has never stopped acting as President Trump’s personal lawyer. Under his leadership, more than 16,000 DOJ employees have left the department, including a quarter of its attorneys. He has overseen the termination of hundreds of employees, including agents, attorneys, and professional staff who worked on January 6 cases and the Special Counsel Jack Smith investigations.
Because Blanche breaks new ground every day in corruption, obsequiousness, illegality, and dick moves, Justice Connection set up a DOJ Tracker to keep track of it all.
In order to understand how bad this guy is, it’s helpful to contrast him with the best and compare him with the worst Attorneys General in American history. Blanche has done the exact opposite of what the former did, while exceeding the awfulness of the latter. Given how many shit AGs we’ve had—since 2001 alone: Gonzales, Sessions, Barr, Bondi, and, albeit for different reasons, Merrick Garland—that’s no small feat.
Here’s a look at how Blanche stacks up against the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly…
The Good
Amos T. Akerman (1870-71)
Although the United States has had an Attorney General since 1789, the post was more or less ornamental until 1870. That’s when the Justice Department was established, mostly to enforce the Reconstruction Amendments—a priority for President Grant.
Akerman was tapped to lead this effort. It was an odd selection—he’d been a colonel in the Confederate Army, after all, and, before the Civil War, an enslaver—but it proved an inspired choice. He took to the role with a vengeance, zealously enforcing the Ku Klux Klan Acts, kicking ass and taking names. The DOJ’s own website chronicles his achievements: “In the first years of Grant’s first term in office as President, there were over 1,000 indictments against Klan members with over 550 convictions won by new Department of Justice lawyers. By late 1871, there were more than 3,000 indictments and 600 more convictions. Due to the initial and highly successful efforts of the new Department of Justice and Attorney General Akerman, there was a dramatic decrease in violence in the South by the time he left office in 1872.”
Todd Blanche has defended the pardons of the J6 besiegers, shat on civil rights, and turned an official blind eye as ICE—the neo-KKK—kidnaps and murders U.S. residents willy-nilly.
Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. (1961-64)
RFK relentlessly pursued the Mafia and organized crime figures.
Todd Blanche happily—nay, lovingly—does the bidding of his capo Trump, a creature of organized crime and a mob money launderer.
Elliot Richardson (1973)
When President Nixon ordered Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating Watergate, the AG resigned instead.
Todd Blanche has the Justice Department investigating former special counsel Jack Smith, in order to protect his Oval Office client, a convicted felon, and keep Volume 2 of Smith’s damning report under seal.
Robert Jackson (1940-41)
Jackson is best known for being the Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg after the Second World War. At Nuremberg, leaders of the Third Reich were hanged.
Todd Blanche happily—nay, lovingly—works for Nazis.
The Bad
A. Mitchell Palmer (1919-1921)
Spooked by the Bolshevik Revolution, Palmer went after every Communist he could find—real or imagined. His employment of the Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) to round up union leaders, dissidents, immigrants, and political enemies of the state in what became known as “Palmer raids” is an antecedent of techniques used by ICE. The ACLU—another legal organization that strongly opposes Blanche’s nomination—was founded to push back on this fascist Javert.
Todd Blanche is cool with rounding up perceived enemies of the state, and the building of concentration camps, and coming up with creative ways to indict Trump’s adversaries.
Edwin Meese III (1985-88)
One of Ronald Reagan’s most trusted advisors and the architect of a lot of the Gipper’s retrograde law enforcement policies, Meese involved himself in all manner of shady shit. This example, noted by Christopher Brauchli at Counterpunch in 2005, hits different today:
When Mr. Meese had to sell his house in California in order to move to Washington he was not a wealthy man. Thomas Barrack loaned a purchaser of Mr. Meese’s house $70,000 so he could buy the house. The buyer gave the $70,000 to Mr. Meese as a down payment. Thereafter, Mr. Barrack received a job as deputy under secretary of the Interior Department. Thereafter, Mr. Barrack forgave the $70,000 loan.
Meese’s Wiki page is one scandal after another: Bechtel, Wedtech, Iran-Contra.
Since he left office, Meese has been a key figure in the move to put John Roberts on the Supreme Court; a board member of the Federalist Society and a host of other rightwing outfits; a Heritage Foundation mainstay; and the recipient, courtesy of Trump, of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Todd Blanche is involved with enough shady activity to make Semion Mogilevich blush. At any other point in U.S. history, any one of the myriad scandals he’s participated in—all of them big enough to make Bechtel and Wedtech seem like failure-to-yield citations—would be career-ending.
Bill Barr (1991-93; 2019-20)
In his first stint as AG, Barr helped George H.W. Bush cover up his involvement with Iran-Contra. In his second stint as AG, he helped Trump cover up his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein—and was, infamously, in charge of the Bureau of Prisons when Epstein died.
Todd Blanche’s priority is to cover up Trump’s involvement with Jeffrey Epstein—even though it is now expressly against the law to do so. He went so far as to have a collegial meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, the most notorious living child sex trafficker, after moving her out of a maximum security prison to a place where she could keep a puppy. The two of them looked very cozy together.
The Ugly
Harry M. Daugherty (1921-24)
Daugherty was a member in good standing of the “Ohio Gang,” cronies of Warren G. Harding from his days as a state politician; he was also Harding’s campaign manager in 1920, helping one of the worst presidents in American history win the White House.
On Daugherty’s lackadaisical watch, the Teapot Dome corruption scandal—in which the Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall, took bribes from an oil company in exchange for leases on petroleum reserves owned by the U.S. government—unfolded, roiling the Harding Administration and the nation. While two special prosecutors eventually absolved Daugherty from direct complicity in the scandal, he was widely believed to have turned a blind eye to what Harding’s fellow cronies were up to.
At the time, Teapot Dome was the biggest political scandal in the nation’s history. Seriously: Bribes from a corporation to a minor Cabinet member was the biggest political scandal in the nation’s history. Those were the days!
Todd Blanche abets and enables a new Teapot Dome every fucking day. One particularly egregious example: Blanche forced the Justice Department to accept a “settlement” on behalf of Trump’s bogus lawsuit against the IRS—this $1.776 billion payout would be, essentially, a plundering of U.S. taxpayer money—and then signed an addendum, barring the IRS from further investigating any tax shenanigans by Trump or his family:
John Mitchell (1969-72)
Mitchell resigned as Attorney General in 1972 to run President Nixon’s re-election campaign. In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, he was found guilty of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury, and spent 19 months in federal prison. He was also disbarred.
Todd Blanche, as discussed, is currently and actively violating federal law, withholding troves of documents related to Donald Trump’s long relationship with, and complicity in the crimes of, Jeffrey Epstein, the most notorious child sex trafficker and serial rapist in recent memory. He’s also announced that there would be no further investigation into any of the Epstein-Trump cronies mentioned in the Files.
The Justice Department was not the only legal entity founded in 1870. That year marked the establishment of a number of state and local bar associations, including the New York City Bar Association. As Fordham University Law School’s Jed H. Shugerman explains in a 2014 article:
The traditional view is that Congress created the DOJ to increase the federal government’s capacity to litigate a growing docket as a result of the Civil War, and more recent scholarship contends that Congress created the DOJ to enforce Reconstruction and ex-slaves’ civil rights. However, it has been overlooked that the DOJ bill eliminated about one third of federal legal staff. The founding of the DOJ had less to do with Reconstruction, and more to do with “retrenchment” (budget-cutting and fiscal conservatism) and anti-patronage reform. The DOJ’s creation was contemporaneous with major professionalization efforts (especially the founding of modern bar associations) to make the practice of law more exclusive and more independent from partisan politics. A small group of reformers worked on a combination of the DOJ bill, civil service reform, bureaucratic independence, and founding modern bar associations in the late 1860s through 1870.
It is appropriate, then, that a bar association is calling for Blanche’s nomination to be shot down. Attorneys know better than anyone when one of their own is making a mockery of the law, and it’s encouraging to see so many of them mobilizing against this DOJ atrocity.
As mentioned, the letter to the Judiciary Committee sent by the City Bar explores in detail how Blanche abuses his power, shits on the rights of U.S. citizens, is loyal to Trump above all else, and has undermined both the independence and the integrity of the Justice Department. The City Bar authors conclude:
Under normal circumstances, each of these improper actions by Mr. Blanche as Deputy Attorney General and Acting Attorney General would be grounds for disqualifying him from serving as Attorney General. Together, they demonstrate that, whatever his prior experience or formal credentials, Mr. Blanche is unfit to lead the U.S. Department of Justice. As the group of 100 retired judges said in their grievance complaint, “The country deserves an Attorney General who is above reproach and serves the country without fear or favor, without placing party or personal interest above the law of the nation.” Mr. Blanche does not meet that test.
Todd Blanche has no business running the Justice Department. His nomination to a post once held by RFK and Amos Akerman is nothing less than an insult. If he is confirmed, the rule of law is dead—and, to quote a John Locke aphorism etched into the wall of Main Justice: “Where law ends tyranny begins.”
Photo credit: Close-up of Blanche’s official portrait.
If the New York bar believes what it wrote, why isn't it moving to disbar Blanche at the same time as objecting to his confirmation?
Without a doubt, he is completely unfit to be AG. Thank you for the perspective. I have written to my Senators, sadly I believe my urging a no vote will fall on deaf ears. One, Thom Tillis should know better but after Blanche's sham meeting with trump epstein victims I fear he is a yes vote.
I fail to understand how trump can shit on folks like Tillis, Cronyn and Cassidy, no less treat the likes of Collins and Murkowsky as dirt and they gladly eat shit and dirt, doing his bidding. Pathetic!