#jared wise

The DOJ Just Hired a Man Who Cheered for Cops to Be Killed

He called Capitol police “Nazis” and screamed “Kill ’em!” Now he’s working at the Department of Justice.

ADAM KINZINGER

AUG 07, 2025

Once upon a time—not long ago—the Department of Justice meant something. It stood as the last line of defense for a constitutional republic under assault. It was supposed to be the place where no man, no movement, no mob could rise above the law. It was where democracy showed its teeth against those who tried to replace it with violence.

But this week, the DOJ sent a different message. And that message was simple: If you try to overthrow democracy for the right person, we will protect you. If you scream for police officers to be killed in service of the right cause, we will reward you. If you choose the side of authoritarianism, the Department of Justice under Donald Trump will welcome you back with open arms.

Meet Jared Wise.

He’s not a cartoon villain. He’s not some unhinged guy in a fur hat. He’s not even your average MAGA rioter swept up in delusion and peer pressure. No—he was once a supervisory agent with the FBI. A man trained in law enforcement. A man who took an oath. A man who knew better.

It's so weird how they defend this.

MAGA will say he was a former FBI agent which means diddly since he left the FBI in 2017 due to poor performance and was in no way acting as one in 2020.

They just don't give a damn what they do or what we think about what they do. They'll do just about anything and point their finger in your face about what somebody else did.

Lisa Graves at Legal AF:

Just last night, Todd Blanche stood by his claim to Steve Bannon that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is not independent of the president. That is certainly true under Todd Blanche, but it was not true under the attorneys general who came before him.

He reiterated that position in his written answers to Questions for the Record submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where his nomination for Attorney General is pending. During last week’s hearing, Blanche said of Trump, “I’m his lawyer,” before quickly trying to walk it back to “was.” But it’s plain that he is still acting like Trump’s lawyer–not America’s top law enforcement official charged with enforcing the law on behalf of all Americans. No Senate devoted to equal justice would confirm him as AG, but Trump loyalists already confirmed him as Deputy AG last March in a strictly partisan 52-46 vote. Democrats raised serious concerns that Blanche would fail to protect DOJ’s traditional independence from presidential interference in prosecutorial decisions. Blanche responded that Trump would never ask him “to do anything illegal or immoral…” Those words are far less assuring than they first appear. Over the past 16 months, Blanche has aggressively protected Trump by shielding him from the mandated release of the fuller Epstein files, which mention Trump numerous times; pursuing prosecutions of his purported political enemies; using DOJ to secure an unprecedented and outlandish immunity deal for Trump and his family and companies; and otherwise contorting the nation’s top law enforcement agency into Trump’s law firm.

Despite Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley’s reading of prepared remarks insisting that DOJ is doing fine–because other career lawyers continue to do their job to enforce the law where they can–the reality is that Blanche has decimated the department. That appears to be exactly the job Trump hired him to do. It starts with the Reagan maxim that “personnel is policy.” The Justice Department has never had a top official who worked as the president’s criminal defense attorney. Never. Then again, we’ve never had a convicted criminal as president until now. I don’t mean to suggest that Pam Bondi, with her taxpayer-funded burn books of insults to sling at Democrats, was merely a figurehead. But after Trump fired her, she made clear that Blanche–not she– had been at the helm of the Epstein files and much more. Even though Bondi served on Trump’s first impeachment defense team, she was no Todd Blanche, who defended Trump in three separate criminal cases, spending more than 6,000 hours keeping him “out of jail for years.” Though Bondi held the title, Blanche was–and is–the power behind the throne, the real insider working the machine.

[...] Blanche is far from the only Trump criminal defense attorney in DOJ leadership. Trump named one of Blanche’s co-counsels, Stanley Woodward, to be the Associate Attorney General, the third in command at DOJ. And John Sauer, who joined Blanche in arguing Trump’s January 6 appeal before the Supreme Court, now serves as the Solicitor General of the United States.

Another Trump criminal defense attorney, Harmeet Dhillon, now leads the Civil Rights Division as it pursues Trump’s demands for state voter registration records. Under Blanche, Trump also tried to install another of his criminal defense attorneys, Lindsey Halligan as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. And, in addition to Bove, Trump has nominated two more of his criminal defense attorneys to the federal bench: Matthew Schwartz to the Second Circuit and Justin Smith to the Eighth Circuit. To be fair, Blanche did not just hire former Trump criminal defense attorneys. He also fired every prosecutor who worked on any of the January 6 cases and every FBI agent, too, something he proudly touted at CPAC. Though he claimed during last week’s hearing that he was merely reciting those firings as a matter of fact, you can see for yourself that he gloried in them. Rather than avoiding potential conflicts of interest, Blanche has treated DOJ as though it were his own law firm, effectively declaring that anyone who once investigated his most important client is conflicted out of their job, regardless of their expertise and distinguished records of civil service. None of this destruction of DOJ would be possible without three men: Blanche, Trump, and John Roberts.