Former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is now serving as acting Attorney General after President Donald Trump fired Pam Bondi from the role.
In his announcement about Bondi’s ouster on Truth Social, Trump called 51-year-old Blanche a “very talented and respected legal mind.”
Blanche, for his part, thanked the president “for the trust and the opportunity to serve as Acting Attorney General.”
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“We will continue backing the blue, enforcing the law, and doing everything in our power to keep America safe,” he said on X.
The two have been connected for years. Blanche defended Trump in three of the president’s criminal cases — something critics noted.
“The DOJ is not a personal law firm, yet Donald Trump has installed another one of his former personal defense lawyers to lead the DOJ,” Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., wrote on X, adding that Blanche’s “blind allegiance to Trump is not a qualification for the job.”
Blanche’s career
Before joining the department, Blanche was a law clerk for federal judges Denny Chin and Joseph Bianco, who are currently members of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Then, Blanche was a federal prosecutor for eight years at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he’d also been a paralegal. For two years, he was co-chief of the office’s violent crimes unit.
He returned to private practice in 2014, joining WilmerHale’s Manhattan office. In 2017, he went to Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP and became a partner in the firm’s White Collar Defense and Investigations practice.
Blanche eventually resigned from Cadwalader to be on Trump’s defense team, writing in his letter to colleagues that “after much thought/consideration, I have decided it is the best thing for me to do and an opportunity I should not pass up,” according to The Associated Press.
One of those opportunities was the trial where Trump was accused of hiding a hush money payment to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in the last weeks of his 2016 campaign. Trump was ultimately found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records — though the AP writes that he was still impressed with Blanche.
The now-acting attorney general would go on to represent Trump when he was indicted on charges that he tried to overturn the 2020 election, as well as the case where the president allegedly mishandled classified documents at his estate in Mar-a-Lago, Florida.
Under Blanche, Trump’s legal team was able to push the cases back past the 2024 presidential election. Federal judges later dismissed them.
That year, when Trump won the election, he named Blanche as deputy attorney general.
Fallout over Epstein files
Bondi was reportedly fired after Trump grew frustrated with her handling of the Epstein files and her leadership at the Justice Department. She faced sharp bipartisan criticism over the issue during a five-hour House Judiciary Committee hearing where Bondi rejected demands for direct answers and declined to apologize for redaction failures that exposed victims’ names.
Blanche had been the one to announce the DOJ’s final release of Epstein files at a news conference, a day after the department announced it had concluded its review of them. He also interviewed convicted sex offender and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a two-decade prison sentence, last July.
During an interview with Fox News’ Jesse Watters on Thursday, Blanche denied Bondi’s firing had anything to do with the Epstein files, saying he never heard Trump say that.
He also said that “to the extent that the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward.”
“Look, the Epstein files has been a saga that’s lasted…for the past year, and what happened when the president signed the Transparency Act is the Department of Justice has now released all the files with respect to the Epstein saga,” he said.
Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., pushed back on that statement on X, saying “This is a lie.”
“About 50% of the files have been released and per our subpoena it’s illegal to withhold them,” Garcia said. “Blanche may think it’s over, but we are just getting started.”
Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., warned Blanche that he has “30 days to release the rest of the files before becoming criminally liable for failure to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”
