The man who personally defended Donald Trump against federal criminal charges is now acting as the nation's top law enforcement officer, and he wants to make it permanent. Todd Blanche's Senate confirmation hearings for attorney general are shaping up to be the most consequential constitutional stress test of the year. The only question is whether anyone in that chamber has the spine to treat them that way.
Let's Be Clear About What We're Dealing With
Blanche is not a controversial pick in the usual Washington sense, where 'controversial' means someone once said something impolitic at a fundraiser. He is, as The Guardian's Claire Finkelstein lays out in unflinching detail, the most conflicted nominee for attorney general Congress has ever been asked to confirm.
He left his private law firm in 2023 to represent Trump personally in the Manhattan hush-money prosecution. Then he stuck around for the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Then the January 6 prosecution. He was Trump's lawyer in three separate federal and state criminal proceedings against Trump. And now he's being asked to run the Justice Department that oversees federal law enforcement for the entire country.
That's not a revolving door. That's the door being removed from its hinges entirely and used to beat the concept of impartiality to death on the floor of the Oval Office.
The Conflict List Is Not Short
Since becoming deputy attorney general and then acting AG after Pam Bondi was fired in April, Blanche has been busy. According to The Guardian, he signed off on an IRS settlement that would permanently bar the agency from pursuing litigation against Trump, his family, or his businesses. A federal judge has since ruled that settlement constitutes self-dealing and referred the matter to the Florida Bar. The New York Bar has gone further, issuing a letter calling Blanche unfit for office.
He reportedly oversaw the redactions of the Epstein materials, which managed to accidentally reveal the names of trafficking victims the DOJ had promised to protect, while carefully scrubbing references to Trump and other powerful men implicated in the case. He shut down the Justice Department unit dedicated to investigating crypto fraud, right as Trump's own cryptocurrency empire was doing very well for itself, thank you. He championed an 'anti-weaponization' fund that could have funneled government money to January 6 defendants and potentially to Trump himself.
And he has been a driving force behind what The Guardian describes as a slate of vindictive prosecutions, including cases targeting Kilmar Abrego Garcia, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former FBI Director James Comey. You might disagree about any one of those cases in isolation. It is considerably harder to look at all of them together and call it coincidence.
He Already Told the Senate He Won't Recuse Himself
Here's the part that should have everyone paying attention. This is not a mystery. Blanche already appeared before the Senate for his deputy AG confirmation hearings, and Senator Adam Schiff drilled him directly on his conflicts of interest. As The Guardian reports, Schiff pointed out that the 'weaponization' working group was specifically designed to be overseen by whoever held Blanche's role. Blanche acknowledged the conflict. He just refused to call it 'blatant.'
When Schiff pushed him on whether he should recuse himself from any matter implicating the president's interests, given that he personally served as the president's attorney in those same matters, Blanche refused to commit. His stated plan was to follow the guidance of career ethics attorneys at the DOJ. The attorneys he oversees. The attorneys who serve at his pleasure.
Schiff flagged this circularity in real time, and it did not seem to trouble Blanche in the slightest. That is the man they are now being asked to confirm as the permanent top cop of the United States.
Why Trump Picked Him Is the Whole Point
The Guardian's Finkelstein makes an argument that cuts right to the core of what this nomination is actually about: Trump did not pick Blanche despite his conflicts of interest. He picked him because of them.
Think about that for a second. An attorney general with massive personal loyalty to the president, a demonstrated willingness to act on that loyalty while in office, and a built-in conflict that makes independent action structurally difficult is not a bug in Trump's selection process. It is the entire feature. The conflicts are the job description.
Trump has made his one criterion for cabinet positions perfectly clear through repetition. They must be willing to put his interests first, full stop. Anyone who shows a flicker of independent judgment, as Bondi apparently did at some point, gets fired. Blanche has shown no such flicker. He is, by every available measure, exactly what Trump wants in a permanent attorney general.
What the Senate Is Actually Being Asked to Decide
The constitutional role of Senate confirmation is not a formality. It exists precisely for moments like this one. The framers did not put 'advice and consent' in the document because they assumed presidents would always nominate clearly qualified, impartial people. They put it there because they knew some presidents would not.
As The Guardian notes, the attorney general has more potential to damage American democracy than almost any other cabinet position. The department controls federal prosecutions, the FBI, counterintelligence operations, and the enforcement mechanisms of federal law. Putting someone in that chair who has demonstrated he cannot or will not separate his personal loyalty to the president from his legal obligations is not a partisan concern. It is a structural one.
Republican senators are going to have to make a decision here. They can ask real questions and hold a real confirmation process, or they can wave through a nominee who has already told them, under oath, that he sees no serious problem with any of this. There is no middle option that looks good in the history books.
The Dingo Take
The Todd Blanche confirmation hearings should be one of the biggest stories in the country right now. A man who spent years as Donald Trump's personal criminal defense attorney is sitting in the top law enforcement seat in the land, asking to stay there permanently, and his track record in that role already includes a judge calling his conduct self-dealing and two separate bar associations raising fitness concerns. This is not background noise. This is the foreground.
The Senate has a choice, and it is not a complicated one. They can do the job the Constitution assigned them, which means treating this confirmation with the seriousness it deserves, demanding genuine answers about recusal commitments, and voting no if those answers don't come. Or they can rubber-stamp a nominee who has telegraphed, with remarkable clarity, that he intends to use the Justice Department the same way he used his private law practice, as a vehicle for protecting one specific client.
If Blanche is confirmed without a serious fight, do not waste any energy being surprised by what comes next. He has already shown you exactly who he is and exactly what he plans to do. The only real question at this point is whether enough senators are paying attention, or whether they have already decided they'd rather not know.
