Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump’s pick for deputy attorney general, acknowledged at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday that he remains the president’s lawyer. But he insisted that their close ties wouldn’t be a problem.
The tight-knit personal relationship he’s established with Trump over the past two years presents a major question over how he will handle the job of deputy attorney general — especially when he continues to claim that every prosecution against Trump was nothing but partisan hackery. Blanche attempted to assuage those concerns at his hearing with the Senate Judiciary Committee, including saying that his close relationship with Trump showed that their concerns about the president’s conduct were unnecessary.
“I don’t think that President Trump is going to ask me to do anything illegal or immoral,” Blanche said when asked how he would respond to an illegal order from the president.
“But if he does, you will say no?” Sen. Richard Blumenthal replied.
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“I will follow the law, senator. Period,” Blanche said. “I’ve spent … probably thousands of hours with President Trump over the past couple of years. So I don’t just say that flippantly. I say that with experience and firsthand knowledge.”
That said, during the hearing, Blanche acknowledged that the president did not give Congress the legally mandated 30-day heads-up before recently removing several inspectors general across the federal government.
“He obviously did not,” Blanche said with a sheepish smile, which he often displayed in court over the past two years when judges forced him to cede ground.
Blanche’s hearing stood out as particularly geared toward easing Democrats’ fears. He defended FBI agents who were assigned Jan. 6 cases, unlike Attorney General Pam Bondi’s vow to “investigate the investigators.” He said he had watched videos of the insurrectionists’ violence at the Capitol, unlike FBI director nominee Kash Patel’s efforts to rewrite that day.
Blanche was once a registered Democrat. But two years ago, he took on Trump as a client when his legal woes seemed insurmountable.
Blanche left a Wall Street law firm to stand by a client who seemed poised to lose his real estate empire and botch a political comeback. He turned his personal life upside down to become Trump’s closest legal ally, moving his family from New York to a $1.7 million home within a half-hour drive from Mar-a-Lago in Florida — all while fending off three criminal indictments simultaneously, one from the Manhattan district attorney and another two from the DOJ special counsel.
He lost the only case that went to trial when a jury convicted Trump of faking business documents to cover up the delivery of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels. But Trump avoided any prison time when he was sentenced last month, and the special counsel’s indictments fizzled into nothing when Trump won the election in November.
Sen. Adam Schiff said that some of Blanche’s comments in the hearing sounded like he was still acting like Trump’s defense lawyer.
“You have not been confirmed yet. Are you still Donald Trump’s lawyer?” Schiff asked pointedly.
Blanche looked up at the ceiling and pondered for a split second, the only time he had to take a pause during the hearing.
“Yes, my attorney-client relationship with President Trump remains, yes.”
If confirmed, Blanche would help lead a Justice Department that’s firing career employees and quickly being stuffed with the president’s own lawyers. The seat he’s likely to fill is currently kept warm by Emil Bove, who previously served alongside Blanche at the Trump defense table and has spent the past three weeks making dramatic and politically driven personnel changes at the DOJ.
Blanche said he would like to focus on combating violent gang crime, citing his experience as a federal prosecutor in New York who cracked down on transnational criminal organizations.
But Democrats demanded to know how he’d stand up to the president at a time when Trump is attempting to downsize or shut down agencies with the stroke of a pen — and being repeatedly castigated by federal judges for doing so.
“We have a president who thinks that the DOJ is his law firm and that all the lawyers in the DOJ are his lawyers,” Sen. Mazie Hirono said.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.
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