Of Course, John Roberts Helped Fuel This Disaster, too
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 weekâs hearing, Blanche said of Trump, âIâm his lawyer,â before quickly trying to walk it back to âwas.â But itâs plain that he is still acting like Trumpâs lawyerânot Americaâs 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 DOJâs traditional independence from presidential interference in prosecutorial decisions. Blanche responded that Trump would never ask him âto do anything illegal or immoralâŚâ 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 nationâs top law enforcement agency into Trumpâs law firm.
Despite Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassleyâs reading of prepared remarks insisting that DOJ is doing fineâbecause other career lawyers continue to do their job to enforce the law where they canâthe 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 âpersonnel is policy.â The Justice Department has never had a top official who worked as the presidentâs criminal defense attorney. Never. Then again, weâve never had a convicted criminal as president until now. I donât 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 Blancheânot sheâ had been at the helm of the Epstein files and much more. Even though Bondi served on Trumpâs 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 âout of jail for years.â Though Bondi held the title, Blanche wasâand isâthe 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 Blancheâs co-counsels, Stanley Woodward, to be the Associate Attorney General, the third in command at DOJ. And John Sauer, who joined Blanche in arguing Trumpâs 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 Trumpâs 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 weekâs 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.
A great post by Lisa Graves in Legal AF on how Acting AG Todd Blanche has turned the DOJ into the personal law firm of Donald Trump.
