The Department of Justice
Donald Trump's personal law firm.
Todd Blanche, Donald’s former and current personal defense attorney, has served as Acting Attorney General of the United States since April 2. In that time, he has helped create a slush fund benefiting Donald’s allies and January 6 insurrectionists. He has shielded Donald and his family from IRS scrutiny, reportedly helping Donald avoid a $100 million tax bill. He has pursued a second indictment of James Comey based on an Instagram post featuring seashells on a beach. And, of course, he continues refusing to release the Epstein files.
On July 7, the Department of Justice alumni group Justice Connection sent a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. More than 1,200 former DOJ employees signed it, representing fourteen presidential administrations spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The letter itself runs fifty-nine pages, and those pages contain nothing but signatures.
Its central message was unmistakable: the culture of fear Todd Blanche has created inside the Department of Justice must end.
It is not just former Justice Department lawyers raising the alarm.
On June 22, 101 former judges filed a seventy-three-page ethics complaint accusing Blanche of conflicts of interest, incompetence, and conduct prejudicial to the administration of justice.
The Department of Justice dismissed the complaint as a “pathetic stunt,” which is a curious response given that it made little effort to refute the substance of the allegations.
The consequences inside the department have been staggering.
Roughly 16,000 of the Department of Justice’s more than 100,000 employees have left since Blanche assumed leadership. That includes more than one-quarter of the department’s career attorneys.
Former colleagues and members of the judiciary have described Blanche’s tenure as unprecedented.
They do not mean that as praise.
On April 7, Blanche was asked whether he hoped to become Attorney General permanently.
Blanche: I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to keep me as acting, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate me, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and I go back to being the DAG, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, thank you very much. I love you, sir. So I don’t have any goals or aspirations beyond that.
I often wonder whether people like Todd Blanche realize just how pathetic they sound.
“Thank you, sir. May I please have another?”
That was all I could think while listening to the ghost of Heinrich Himmler answer reporters’ questions.
As Deputy Attorney General, Blanche also oversaw the questioning of Ghislaine Maxwell in 2025 after she had been transferred to a minimum-security prison, a move that ran contrary to Bureau of Prisons policy governing convicted sex offenders.
Let’s remember exactly who Ghislaine Maxwell is.
She was Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator.
She is a convicted sex trafficker.
She is a convicted predator who abused girls and young women.
And yet Todd Blanche apparently believed she deserved special treatment.
A federal court later cited Blanche’s own public statements from that same period as evidence supporting its May 22 finding that the Department of Justice could not overcome the presumption of vindictive prosecution in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who was wrongfully deported to a prison in El Salvador before being returned to the United States to face criminal charges the government has yet to prove.
The pattern extends well beyond those cases.
Blanche initiated a leak investigation targeting reporters at The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal after Donald reportedly handed him a stack of newspaper articles marked “treason” in his trademark Sharpie.
In the Broadview Six case, the Department of Justice agreed to pay the defendants’ attorneys’ fees while simultaneously attempting to block discovery, a move legal experts argue was designed to prevent scrutiny of Blanche’s own conduct.
Nor has Blanche demonstrated any meaningful commitment to transparency regarding the Epstein investigation.
His Justice Department has released millions of pages connected to Jeffrey Epstein, but more than three million additional pages remain either withheld entirely or so heavily redacted as to be virtually unreadable.
A federal judge is now demanding that the department explain why so much material continues to be concealed.
The obvious question is also the unavoidable one.
Do we honestly believe that the documents already released contain the most damaging evidence while the remaining three million pages contain nothing of consequence?
Of course not.
We still do not have the full story.
The Epstein files remain incomplete because somebody inside the Department of Justice has decided the American people should not see everything.
Todd Blanche is protecting somebody.
The judges are not alone in sounding the alarm.
On July 2, Special Counsel Jack Smith gave his first televised interview since resigning after leading the two federal prosecutions against Donald before they were ultimately dismissed.
Smith: Well, as I said earlier, I, from my perspective, have seen a number of cases. James Comey, Letitia James, Jerome Powell. I mean, right? There’s not criminality here. I mean, seashells. I mean, so the only reasonable explanation is the president has it out for these people and he has people who are his former personal lawyers who are going to do what he says regardless of the facts or law. Again, just to juxtapose it, I didn’t have people on my team resigning because they refused to go along with a scheme to go after somebody. That was not what happened. You see that in all these cases. Imagine if I had been told, “Jack, wherever you think the facts and law dictate, that’s what we’ll do.” That’s what happened then. Can you imagine that happening now if there were allegations of corruption inside this administration? They would never appoint an outside independent person to investigate. We all know that. That’s the difference between following process, following the facts, and preserving independence.
Smith later told Nicole Wallace that the United States is facing an attack on the rule of law that is, in his words, “different in kind and scope to anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
He went on to explain that the Department of Justice can no longer perform the basic functions necessary to represent the American people in court because judges increasingly no longer trust federal prosecutors.
It is difficult to overstate how devastating that assessment is.
The Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice once represented the gold standard of federal law enforcement. Career attorneys built cases carefully. They pursued prosecutions only after assembling overwhelming evidence. Their credibility before the courts was among the department’s greatest assets.
Today, many DOJ attorneys walk into federal court carrying exactly the opposite presumption.
Instead of assuming competence and integrity, judges increasingly approach them with skepticism, doubting not only the strength of the government’s evidence but also the motives behind its prosecutions.
That collapse of institutional credibility did not happen accidentally. It was built.
Blanche’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled for July 15 and 16. Assuming every Democrat votes against his nomination, all twelve Republican members of the committee would have to support him in order to advance his confirmation.
By the time Jack Smith sat down for that interview, he had already spent months under direct pressure from the very administration he once investigated.
He had been subpoenaed before the House Judiciary Committee, participated in a closed-door deposition, and later testified publicly for hours.
Then, one month later, U.S. District and Donalds pocket Judge Aileen Cannon, the same judge who dismissed Donald’s classified documents case, ruled that the remaining volume of Smith’s final report could not be released.
She continues, much like Todd Blanche, to function less like an independent public servant than as another member of Donald’s legal defense team.
During the interview, Smith acknowledged that he believes it is entirely plausible the Department of Justice could eventually indict him as well, joining former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James on the ever-growing list of Donald’s perceived enemies now facing criminal investigations.
This is all happening in plain sight.
The Department of Justice has become a profoundly corrupted institution under Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche because Donald has completely erased the wall that traditionally separated the White House from the Department of Justice.
As I warned this would happen, the Department of Justice has become Donald Trump’s personal law firm. Its mission is no longer to pursue justice impartially.
Its mission is to protect Donald, punish his enemies, and advance his political agenda.
That is not how constitutional democracies function.
It is how authoritarian regimes do.
Trump is now really #1
He is the person most wanted dead in the entire world.
It’s like you’ve never seen before!
Unfortunately.for Trump, Hitler still has the #1 spot for evil but Trump is catching up. Like you wouldn’t believe!
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
As a former federal prosecutor in the D.O.J., the closest analogy I can draw between Blanche and Trump is that Blanche is to Trump as Himmler was to Hitler.