How Todd Blanche Climbed the Ranks in Trumpworld to Acting Attorney General

Todd Blanche, who will temporarily lead the Department of Justice as the nation’s acting attorney general, has one of the few qualities that defines a survivor in the heads-will-roll world of President Donald Trump. He does the kind of damage control Trump loves.

He’s a frequent guest on cable news and podcasts — perhaps more than any active deputy attorney general before him — defending political DOJ investigations and the Trump administration’s slow rollout of the Epstein files, while striking a noncombative tone he uses in court.

Twice now, federal judges have selected replacements to serve as interim U.S. attorneys, only to have Blanche swoop in and immediately terminate them. He asserts his purported executive authority with X posts that borrow the “you’re fired” catchphrase from Trump’s reality TV heyday. “Judges don’t pick U.S. Attorneys, @POTUS does,” reads one. “Here we go again,” starts another.

And when NOTUS drew attention to the fact that White House aide-turned-prosecutor Lindsey Halligan was annoying career lawyers by having members of the U.S. Marshals Service in her government office at all times, Blanche quietly eliminated the security detail.

In a presidential administration inundated with scandals — particularly over the way it deploys federal law enforcement to exact revenge on the president’s political enemies — Blanche stands out for operating as a sort of fixer. It was Blanche who was entrusted to fly down to Florida to meet with Jeffrey Epstein’s imprisoned associate Ghislaine Maxwell last July, where he offered her criminal immunity to speak openly about the billionaire’s underage sex trafficking ring, eventually moving her to a minimum-security prison.

She used the meeting with Blanche to lavish Trump with praise for his “extraordinary achievement in becoming president,” describing Trump as “very cordial and very kind to me” and denying he ever was involved with any of Epstein’s victims. She was later moved to what some described as a “Club Fed” minimum-security prison, drawing criticism that she had been rewarded for paying lip service.

At the time, legal scholars and political pundits railed against the highly unusual move to send such a high-ranking DOJ official — with an obvious conflict of interest — to do the job of an assistant U.S. attorney already familiar with the sprawling criminal investigation.

One person familiar with both Trump and Blanche described the decision-making process at the White House this way: “Trump says, ‘What do we do to make this go away?’ Todd says, ‘I’ll go down there.’”

The issues Trump had with Pam Bondi as attorney general — not being sufficiently aggressive at pursuing political enemies and her handling the Epstein files rollout — don’t seem to stick to Blanche. But that’s due, in part, to the bond Blanche formed with Trump when he worked as his defense lawyer. At the time Trump faced several indictments, an experience which one former member of his legal team described as like being in a foxhole during a battle.

During Blanche’s tenure as No. 2 at the DOJ, there were vengeance firings carried out against prosecutors, FBI agents, analysts and investigators who worked on then-special counsel Jack Smith’s criminal probe of Trump’s failed attempt to remain in power after losing the 2020 election and his mishandling of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House.

Many of the dismissal letters have borne Blanche’s signature, according to dozens of former prosecutors who’ve described them to NOTUS, and the form letters merely cite presidential prerogatives under “Article II.” At the Conservative Political Action Conference last week, Blanche relished the terminations.

“There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” he said, drawing the audience’s applause.

But some of those who know him best call him far from true MAGA and say he’s an opportunist who has skyrocketed from a little-known New York City defense lawyer to serving, at least temporarily, as the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer. In fact, Blanche donated $500 in 2020 to Mimi Rocah, a Democratic Westchester County district attorney who would go on to criminally investigate Trump. When he was approached by a reporter with a question about it in the days after he joined Trump’s legal team three years ago, Blanche downplayed it as a show of support for a personal friend.

A friend from his time at a private firm described Blanche as a reliable lawyer who didn’t seem driven by the kind of partisan furor that has gripped current DOJ leadership; they said he was an unassuming guy with a gentle demeanor.

“I don’t get it,” this person said.

One former Trump attorney, who worked alongside Blanche and would listen to him speak on legal team calls, said Blanche has simply shown a better ability to tolerate Trump’s “tantrums” and change Trump’s mind on things.

Another source credits Blanche’s success with his shrewd decision to go from initially representing Boris Epshteyn, a Trump political adviser who found himself on the wrong end of the DOJ’s special counsel investigation, to representing Trump himself. Loyalty is the coin of the Trump realm. Epshteyn came out appearing gracious, but Blanche ended up looking like a Trump devotee. With little warning, Blanche relocated his family to South Florida to be closer to Mar-a-Lago.

Blanche deftly juggled the simultaneous New York state and federal criminal cases against Trump, an experience that left him feeling embittered toward the opposing counsel. While his arguments about a political prosecution failed to convince Justice Juan Merchan in Manhattan or U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington, Blanche has held firm to that belief during his tenure at the DOJ, according to two sources who know him well. One of them, in January 2025, surmised that “Todd is not gonna stand in the way” of the major changes at the department that would seek to punish investigators who went after Trump. They were right.

In office, Blanche has gained a reputation for his willingness to take calls from former Trump lawyers whose clients are seeking a pardon — or want to see a criminal investigation get brushed aside.

Several former DOJ employees expressed frustration at the way Blanche has taken meetings with defense lawyers with little to no heads up to the line prosecutors, who are then often caught off guard by new orders to water down a criminal case. One pointed to the sudden reversal of a wide-ranging corruption case against former Puerto Rico Gov. Wanda Vázquez Garced and others, which was knocked down to a misdemeanor case “at the direction of the DAG’s office over objections of the entire trial team,” one source said. When lower-level prosecutors held firm in court that the case was indeed serious, Trump ultimately pardoned Garced and a disgraced former FBI agent involved.

Still, many who have known Blanche for years say he has not changed all that much.

“He’s the same Todd,” said one friend months ago. “He probably marvels at the fact that he’s deputy attorney general. He never had the ambition to be the attorney general. He’s just trying to do the best he can. He knows he’s got a difficult client. But Trump calls him 10 times a day.”

But Blanche is a controversial figure with some MAGA faithful. Two close Trump allies told NOTUS they blame Blanche, not Bondi, for the lack of progress in indicting people the president has targeted. They say that consensus stretches far beyond them.

“He’s the one that has actually been running the department,” the first source said, calling Bondi a “figurehead.” The second said, “He needs to be removed.”

While it’s unclear whether these concerns have reached the president yet, the jockeying to succeed Bondi as Justice Department chief is already underway. At least two people have reached out to Trump directly to throw their hats in the ring, according to the second source.

The first source said that Trump was considering Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, to take over as the ultimate replacement for Bondi, but questioned his qualifications.

“When was the last time Lee Zeldin was in a courtroom?”