If you had told me twenty years ago, when I first met Todd Blanche, that he’d be up for confirmation as Attorney General of the United States, I’d have been thrilled. He’s an excellent choice, I probably would have said – experienced, capable, decent. I would have said the same ten years ago, or even two years ago.
But things have changed. More precisely, Blanche has changed. Long forgotten (or willfully discarded) are the core principles we learned as rookies and later passed on to future generations of SDNY prosecutors: judicious use of the fearsome power to disrupt lives and strip away a defendant’s individual liberty; commitment to the truth, unvarnished and unspun, even if detrimental to our own case; prosecution insulated from politics.
In casting off those formative lessons, cultivated and practiced by generations of DOJ prosecutors across administrations of Republicans and Democrats alike, Blanche has emerged as something altogether unrecognizable. In their place he has adopted a guiding tenet of get-ahead expediency, playing to the politics (and politicians) of the moment. The man now freely spouts incendiary falsehoods, including his recent claim that there is “a ton of evidence that the [2020] election was rigged” – despite the conspicuous absence of even a single criminal charge by the Justice Department he leads.
Blanche’s cynical, truth-optional approach has elicited condemnation from DOJ alums, virtually all Democrats, and even some Republicans. But it also has landed him at the doorstep of the permanent gig as the most powerful law enforcement official in the country.
(Now for the full disclosure. I’ve known Blanche since our early days as trial prosecutors at the Southern District of New York in the mid-2000s. We worked in different units – me in Organized Crime and Blanche in Violent Crimes and Gangs, and later the White Plains satellite office – but we were colleagues and friends. I publicly defended him in 2024 when he was under fire for representing Donald Trump personally in various criminal cases. And I have criticized him, frequently and sharply, since he became a senior DOJ official in 2025. I stand by all of it.)
On Wednesday, at a confirmation hearing upon his nomination as Attorney General by President Donald Trump, Blanche will face questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee. With Republicans holding narrow majorities of 11-10 in the Committee (with one vacancy following the passing of Senator Lindsey Graham) and 52-47 in the full Senate, Blanche has little margin for error. I suspect he will squeeze by, barely. He has undertaken a campaign to meet individually with Republican senators, and he is savvy enough to say all the necessary things behind closed doors. But Blanche’s confirmation is hardly assured, and there’s much yet to be determined at the hearings. Democrats will come ready for battle, and even some Republicans harbor doubts.
Here are five questions that Blanche must be asked, and that Senators ought to compel him to answer clearly, without empty rhetoric or crafty hedges.
Should the Justice Department, in its exercise of prosecutorial power, be independent from the president? Blanche has squarely contradicted himself on this core question. At his confirmation hearing for the Deputy Attorney General position in February 2025, Blanche proclaimed that “politics would play no role in my decisions as deputy attorney general.” In May 2026, Blanche asserted that the notion that DOJ has been politically weaponized is “simply not true. It is absolutely not true.”
Yet Blanche also has argued that DOJ is a mere instrumentality of the President, and well within its mandate to carry out his whims through prosecution. When asked in April 2026 by NBC News about Trump’s social media post instructing then-AG Pam Bondi to indict various Democrats and political adversaries, Blanche responded that “That type of communication from President Trump should make every American happy.” Indeed, Blanche has overseen and vigorously defended the bogus investigations and prosecutions of Letitia James, James Comey, Jerome Powell, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, and other disfavored political antagonists of the President – all of which have failed thus far. And when pressed in May 2026 by CBS News about DOJ’s independence, Blanche reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a copy of the Constitution, and explained, “Article Two says, ‘the executive power shall be vested in the President of the United States of America.’ It does not say that the Attorney General stands off to the side.”
He’s right, technically. No Constitutional provision or statute or Supreme Court ruling states explicitly the AG must be insulated from politics. Rather, DOJ’s independence is borne of longstanding institutional practice and tradition, upheld by generations of AGs and line-level prosecutors alike. DOJ’s independence is not automatic. It’s up to the people who run the place.
DOJ has redacted the names of people who corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein about women or girls. Will you release those names? The Epstein Files Transparency Act specifies that “No record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity…” Yet Blanche – who, according to then-AG Bondi, “was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files” – chose to redact the names of certain people who engaged in disturbing communications with the child sex trafficker.
For example, in one 2014 email, somebody wrote to Epstein, “Thank you for a fun night. Your littlest girl was a little naughty.” Blanche chose to redact the name of this gentleman, contrary to the Act itself. In another email from 2017, a person whose name has been blacked out wrote to Epstein, “She is like Lolita from Nabokov, femme miniature 🙂 So now I should send you her type of candidates only?” Other examples appear throughout the Epstein files, and a federal judge has ordered DOJ to release some information that has been improperly redacted. Will Blanche voluntarily release all the names, as the law requires, or will he keep them hidden?
Do you acknowledge that the Justice Department has a credibility problem? What will you do about it? It used to be exceedingly rare for a federal judge to find that a Justice Department lawyer had been untruthful in court. Now, it happens all the time.
One federal judge in D.C. noted that “trust that has been earned over generations has been lost in weeks.” A federal judge in Illinois concluded that the government’s claims about anti-ICE violence in Chicago was “simply untrue.” A Rhode Island-based federal judge slammed DOJ for offering “misleading, if not utterly false” explanations in court. A federal judge in Maryland blasted prosecutors over the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case: “You have taken the presumption of regularity and you’ve destroyed it.” In a civil matter, a federal judge in Washington found DOJ’s position “contrived,” “manifestly unreasonable,” and “deliberately ignorant.” Three times in recent months, federal judges have taken the extraordinary step of blocking Justice Department criminal subpoenas because they were issued without any basis in valid criminal charges, or in outright bad faith.
Federal prosecutors are taught that, without credibility, they’ve got nothing. Under Blanche’s command, DOJ has lost the trust of the judiciary and the public alike.
Will you authorize payouts to violent January 6th rioters? Blanche has spent weeks distancing himself from his own twisted creation, the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that provoked fierce backlash from Senate Republicans, and within days forced him to abandon the scheme. Now Blanche has been making the Senate rounds, promising that the fund is dead and gone.
But that’s not necessarily the end of the story. Even without a designated slush fund, anybody can submit a claim through the ordinary, pre-existing process for complaints and potential lawsuits against the federal government. Blanche, as AG, will hold broad discretion to pay out those claims. Will he categorically commit to reject any such claims from January 6th rioters who committed violence against police officers? Or will he keep the door open to paying them off with taxpayer money?
Will you subpoena information from journalists only as a last resort in urgent national security matters? This weekend, Blanche’s Justice Department subpoenaed at least five New York Times journalists over their reporting on security concerns about the new Air Force One, donated by Qataris. While there is no categorical legal privilege for communications between journalists and their sources — the Supreme Court considered the privilege and rejected it in a 5-4 decision in 1972 — DOJ has long recognized that subpoenas to journalists tread on fraught First Amendment ground and should be issued sparingly, only in the most extreme circumstances.
In fact, the question above borrows language directly from DOJ’s own policy, adopted during the current administration in April 2025: subpoenas to journalists “are an extraordinary measure to be deployed as a last resort when essential to a successful investigation or prosecution;” such subpoenas must be narrowly drawn and used only when absolutely necessary to address vital national security concerns; and journalists should be given the chance to negotiate or find alternative ways of providing information to DOJ short of testimony about sourcing. Will Blanche follow his own guidance, or is it now open season on reporters whose work might displease the administration?
When Blanche was named Deputy AG last year, the optimistic view was that he might provide institutional ballast, stabilizing DOJ in stormy waters. But in fact he has steered the Justice Department towards institutional wreckage.
Blanche’s job performance thus far has given little reason to expect a return to core prosecutorial values, and he has largely avoided accountability for his missteps. This week’s confirmation hearing will provide a vital opportunity – perhaps the last one – for Senators to demand specific answers from Blanche before he can assume control of the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency.
