If you had told me 20 years ago, when I first met Todd Blanche, that he’d be up for confirmation as attorney general of the United States, I would have been thrilled. He’s an excellent choice, I probably would have said — experienced, capable, decent. I would have said the same ten years ago or even two years ago.

But things have changed. More precisely, Blanche has changed. Long forgotten (or willfully discarded) are the core principles we learned as rookies and later passed on to future generations of Southern District of New York prosecutors: judicious use of the fearsome power to disrupt lives and strip away a defendant’s individual liberty; commitment to the truth, unvarnished and unspun, even if detrimental to our own case; prosecution insulated from politics.

In casting off those formative lessons cultivated and practiced by generations of Department of Justice prosecutors across administrations of Republicans and Democrats alike, Blanche has emerged as something altogether unrecognizable. In their place, he has adopted a guiding tenet of get-ahead expediency, playing to the politics (and politicians) of the moment. The man now freely spouts incendiary falsehoods, including his recent claim that there is “a ton of evidence that the [2020] election was rigged” — despite the conspicuous absence of even a single criminal charge by the Justice Department he leads.

Blanche’s cynical, truth-optional approach has elicited condemnation from DoJ alums, virtually all Democrats, and even some Republicans. But it has also landed him at the doorstep of the permanent gig as the most powerful law-enforcement official in the country.

(Now for the full disclosure: I’ve known Blanche since our early days as trial prosecutors at SDNY in the mid-2000s. We worked in different units — me in organized crime and Blanche in violent crimes and gangs and later the White Plains satellite office — but we were colleagues and friends. I publicly defended him in 2024 when he was under fire for representing Donald Trump personally in various criminal cases. And I have criticized him, frequently and sharply, since he became a senior DoJ official in 2025. I stand by all of it.)

On Wednesday, at a confirmation hearing following his nomination as attorney general by President Donald Trump, Blanche will face questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee. With Republicans holding a narrow majorities of 11-10 in the committee (with one vacancy following the passing of Senator Lindsey Graham) and 52-47 in the full Senate, Blanche has little margin for error. I suspect he will squeeze by, barely. He has undertaken a........

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