Todd Blanche spent years defending Donald Trump in criminal court. Hush money, classified documents, the conspiracy to overturn an election Trump lost. Blanche took these cases and built a career on them. Now the Senate has confirmed him as Attorney General of the United States, by a vote of 50 to 49, with only two Republicans breaking ranks to say what should have been obvious to all of them.

The client never changed, only Blanche’s title did.

The nation’s chief law enforcement officer is a man whose entire professional identity was built on protecting Trump from the consequences of Trump’s own conduct. Blanche did the job well. He is about to do the same job but now with subpoena power, prosecutorial discretion, and the entire Department of Justice sitting in his hand like a loaded weapon.

Blanche did not stumble into this post. He was installed as deputy in the spring of last year, promoted to acting head in April after Trump grew impatient with his own handpicked Attorney General and fired her, and confirmed to the permanent role this month after a fight that revealed exactly what kind of man the Senate was being asked to elevate. Under his stewardship, the department has already pursued the campaign of retribution Trump promised on the trail.

  • Investigations aimed at Trump’s critics.
  • Reviews of the cases brought against Trump.
  • A weaponized team built for the sole purpose of running the machinery of justice backward, from verdict to grievance.

This is not a guess about what Blanche might do. It is a description of what he has already done.

Let’s start with James Comey. In April 2026, prosecutors under Blanche indicted the former FBI director over an Instagram photo of seashells arranged to spell “8647,” a slogan critical of the president. The indictment called it a threat to kill. Blanche did not stop there. Within days, word broke that his department was also building a second case against Comey, this one over the classified information he allegedly leaked while running the FBI. Two indictments, two legal theories, one target. Comey’s real offense was never the seashells. It was having investigated Donald Trump in the first place.

Then we have the Southern Poverty Law Center. A whistleblower reported that an enforcer working for Blanche ordered Alabama prosecutors to rush an indictment against the organization despite the prosecutors’ own doubts that the case would hold. Rush it they did.

Next target: Todd Gilbert, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia. Blanche pressured him to reopen an investigation into Biden-era officials over the 2016 Russia inquiry, a case career prosecutors had already concluded did not warrant charges. Gilbert refused to sideline those prosecutors. Gilbert “resigned”.

We know Trump despises protesters. When demonstrators heckled Trump outside a Washington restaurant, Blanche called for investigations into what he termed organized activity, treating a heckle as a federal matter.

John Brennan got investigated for the sin of having run the CIA during the Russia inquiry. Then Cassidy Hutchinson, a junior White House aide investigated for testifying to Congress about January 6. Then a Florida inquiry, run by a Reagan-era prosecutor Blanche personally installed, built around the theory that former law enforcement and intelligence officials spent a decade conspiring against one man.

Asked directly whether the department was investigating people because the president disliked them, Blanche did not deny it. He said it was the president’s right, and his duty, to see it done.

Seriously, he said that and now he is the Top Cop.

Then there is Epstein.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the department to turn over what it held. Blanche’s department collected roughly six million pages and released about half, then declared the law satisfied. Survivors who spent months demanding accountability watched their own names appear unredacted in the documents that were released, while material that might embarrass powerful men stayed sealed. A federal judge had to order the department to produce unredacted files for judicial review. A sitting congressman had to threaten Blanche with criminal liability over the missing thirty days. Members of his own party said publicly they had no confidence he would function as any kind of check on the president who made him.

Ask yourself what kind of Attorney General needs a court order to comply with a law Congress already passed. Ask yourself what kind of Attorney General treats the survivors of a trafficking operation as a public relations inconvenience to be managed rather than victims owed the truth.

Now ask yourself what he will do with the rest of the department’s power, the parts nobody is watching as closely.

Every authoritarian project needs a lawyer willing to make the machinery look legal. Every campaign of retribution needs someone who will sign the memo, approve the subpoena, and call it justice. Blanche has already shown the Senate, the survivors, and the country that he will do exactly that. There is no future order from this president that he is likely to refuse. There is no enemies list he is likely to question. There is no file he will release if releasing it costs his client anything.

Voter suppression will get the department’s blessing under the guise of election integrity. The Epstein files will stay buried in pages nobody is allowed to read. And the next prosecutor who tries to hold this president accountable will discover that the Department of Justice now answers to one man, and that man has never once, in his entire career, said no to Donald Trump.

Todd Blanche was hired to keep one man out of prison. Every attorney has one job: serve the client. Blanche still has exactly one client. The only thing that changed is that now the rest of us are the defendants.