Todd Blanche is the most conflicted nominee for attorney general the US Congress has yet to encounter. As the former private attorney for Donald Trump, Blanche has been an unflappable ally for the president since 2023, when he left his private firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, to represent Trump in the hush-money prosecution brought against him by the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. He went on to represent Trump in two other criminal prosecutions – the Mar-a-Lago classified documents prosecution, and the January 6 prosecution, both brought against Trump by the special counsel Jack Smith.

As both deputy attorney general and as acting head of the justice department since April, when attorney general Pam Bondi was fired by Donald Trump, Blanche has unabashedly continued his advocacy work for his former client through other means. He has signed off on a settlement between the IRS and Donald Trump regarding the latter’s taxes, that would ban the IRS from pursuing litigation against Trump, his family or his businesses forever. That settlement has now been ruled by a federal judge to be self-dealing; she referred the case to the Florida Bar Association. The New York Bar has issued a letter saying that Blanche is unfit for office.

Until very recently, Blanche was actively pursuing the idea of an “anti-weaponization” fund, which was to be used to compensate individuals who were supposedly unfairly investigated or prosecuted by the federal government, who could have included prior defendants from the 6 January 2021 insurrection or potentially even Donald Trump himself. According to Bondi, Blanche oversaw the redactions of the Epstein material, which (supposedly inadvertently) revealed the names of the victims that the department had committed to keeping secret and managed to carefully redact information relating to Donald Trump and other rich and powerful men accused of abusing the young women Epstein trafficked. He has also been a staunch defender of Trump’s ballroom and of his cryptocurrency empire, shutting down the justice department unit assigned to investigate fraud in the crypto market. Blanche has also been one of the key proponents of vindictive investigations and prosecutions, ranging from the prosecution of Kilmar Ábrego Garcia to the........

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