Attorney General Todd Blanche has a blunt answer for anyone who still believes the Justice Department operates at arm’s length from the White House: it doesn’t, and he isn’t pretending otherwise.
“There was this misperception that there’s this separation and independence between the Department of Justice and the White House, and everybody likes to champion that, and they accuse me of not suffering from independence. I don’t. I work for President Trump, but they did too,” Blanche said in an interview released Wednesday on Pod Force One, the New York Post podcast hosted by Miranda Devine.
From Trump’s personal lawyer to attorney general
Blanche is not a career official who drifted into politics. Before taking over the Justice Department, he served as Donald Trump’s personal defense lawyer through the president’s criminal cases. Now he oversees a department that includes the FBI, the DEA and U.S. attorneys’ offices across the country.
In the interview, Blanche argued that the Biden-era Justice Department was the one that had been politicized, and he accused Democrats of “gaslighting the American people” when they say his department is being weaponized. His defense of the department’s independence, though, came down to this: his predecessors worked for their president, and he works for his.
Why the remark matters
Since Watergate, the Justice Department has relied on internal policies and long-standing norms meant to keep prosecutions and investigations insulated from White House politics, a point The New Republic emphasized in its coverage of Blanche’s comments. Those rules exist so that Americans can trust that decisions about who gets investigated and charged are based on facts and law, not on who sits in the Oval Office.
Blanche’s comments land at a sensitive moment. In the same interview, he confirmed there was law enforcement activity at the home of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar on Monday as part of what he called an ongoing investigation, while saying the department was not trying to silence her. Omar has dismissed the probe as partisan.
The interview also comes less than two weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, as the Justice Department and Homeland Security face lawsuits from Democrats and state officials over their efforts targeting state voter rolls and alleged noncitizen voters.
The bottom line
The attorney general of the United States has now said out loud that he works for the president. Supporters call that honesty about how the job works. Critics say it confirms their warnings that the nation’s top law enforcement agency is being run as an extension of the White House. Either way, voters heading to the polls now have his own words to weigh.
Sources: Todd Blanche interview on the New York Post’s Pod Force One podcast; reporting by The New Republic.