Editors at National Review Online explain their opposition to making Todd Blanche the permanent US attorney general.
Todd Blanche has been everything President Trump wants in an attorney general, and that’s the problem.
The president has nominated Blanche to become the full-fledged attorney general, after a months-long audition as acting AG. Prior to this, Blanche had been the Senate-confirmed deputy AG, while the since-ousted Pam Bondi was in the top job. Unfortunately, Blanche has distinguished himself in this interim period only as an instrument of Trump’s unworthy and abusive campaign to investigate and prosecute his political opponents.
The brute fact is that, no matter whose name is on the DOJ letterhead, the president is running the Justice Department. He originally installed Blanche as deputy AG — thanks to Senate Republican quiescence and a strict party-line vote (52–46) back in March 2025 when Trump was at his strongest — because Blanche had served as his loyal and zealous defense lawyer during the onslaught of criminal prosecutions brought against Trump by Democratic prosecutors at the federal and state level. On Blanche’s watch, the Trump DOJ has pursued an unabashedly vindictive agenda of leveraging the government’s awesome prosecutorial powers — its public trust — against the president’s political enemies. To fight lawfare with lawfare.
While Blanche was in his deputy AG role, the DOJ established its Orwellian “Weaponization Working Group.” The group’s mission is twofold.
First, it pushes prosecutors to generate cases against Trump’s political opponents, such as James Comey (who ran the FBI during the Russiagate farce), New York Attorney General Letitia James (who brought a massive state civil fraud suit against Trump, his adult children, and his business empire), Senator Adam Schiff (the California Democrat who led the two impeachment pushes in Trump’s first term), Jerome Powell (the former Federal Reserve Board chairman with whom Trump clashed over interest rates), Lisa Cook (a Biden-appointed Fed Board member Trump has tried to oust), and sundry Obama and Biden administration officials. …
… Second, the group seeks to discredit the Biden DOJ as inherently corrupt.
