The Department of Justice’s Office of the Inspector General “declined further action” on an undisclosed matter involving Attorney General Todd Blanche’s cryptocurrency trades, according to a new federal financial disclosure document reviewed by The Washington Sun.
The revelation of the inspector general’s involvement comes months after ProPublica reported that Blanche — President Donald Trump’s one-time personal lawyer and previous deputy attorney general — torpedoed Biden-era federal investigations into cryptocurrency companies while himself owning six-figures worth of Bitcoin, Ethereum and other digital tokens.
Blanche’s actions prompted a complaint from the watchdog group Campaign Legal Center, which suggested Blanche “blatantly” stood to profit from ending the investigations and called for an inspector general inquiry.
“If Blanche participated in a particular matter affecting the digital asset industry while owning digital assets, he may have violated his ethics agreement and the criminal conflict of interest law,” the complaint read.
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A DOJ spokesperson cast the complaint as “baseless character assassination” in a January statement to ProPublica.
It’s unclear the extent to which the DOJ’s inspector general investigated Blanche or otherwise reviewed the matter this year.
The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment for this story. Patrick Shepherd, spokesperson for the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, which published Blanche’s financial disclosure, declined to comment on the matter, saying that the office “does not respond to questions about specific individuals.”
Office of Government Ethics official Scott de la Vega, who signed off on Blanche’s public financial disclosure report, noted on Sept. 2 that the DOJ inspector general’s involvement pertained to seven of Blanche’s cryptocurrency holdings.
In an earlier ethics filing, DOJ Ethics Program Specialist Monica Felter wrote that four of Blanche’s crypto assets — Bitcoin, Solana, Cardano and Ethereum — were “gifted in their entirety” to his grandchildren and adult children in late May 2025 and early June 2025.
Blanche held between $158,010 and $470,000 in various cryptocurrencies before the divestment, largely in Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Federal law only requires government officials to disclose the value of stock, bond and cryptocurrency assets in broad ranges.
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