DOJ Rewrites Its Own Rules So Todd Blanche Can Moonlight as a Rally Speaker

The Memo That Fixed the Problem By Deleting the Problem

According to CBS News, a memo sent this week by Assistant Attorney General Jolene Ann Laurie relaxes ethics restrictions on Senate-confirmed presidential appointees at the Justice Department. Under the new guidance, they can speak at rallies, canvass for votes, and even serve as delegates or officers of a national political party.

That covers the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, assistant attorneys general, the FBI director, U.S. attorneys, and others. The only catch is that they have to do all of it in their "personal capacities."

Personal capacity. As in, the attorney general of the United States takes the stage at a partisan rally, and we are all supposed to believe the man left his title, his security detail, and his entire professional identity in the coat check.

What the Rules Said Before Someone Got Inconvenienced By Them

A 2024 Justice Department memo said it plainly: "Non-career appointees may not attend any partisan political events, even in their personal capacities." That policy continued one instituted two years earlier. The 2024 memo also told appointees to "avoid making public appearances in any state shortly before a primary or general election in that state, to the greatest extent practicable."

Read that again. Not even in their personal capacities. The old rule saw the loophole coming and slammed it shut in advance, because the people who wrote it understood that nobody is ever just a private citizen when they're the nation's top law enforcement officer.

The new memo takes that loophole, paints it gold, and installs a revolving door.

Blanche Did It First, Then Asked for Forgiveness in Advance

Here's the sequence that matters. Blanche addressed the Republican midterm convention in September. He also attended a rally for a North Carolina Republican Senate candidate. Critics said he was violating long-standing Justice Department norms meant to keep politics separate from the law.

Blanche's response was, "I am not in any way violating any rule or law," and he added that he appeared in his personal capacity. Notice what that defense is. It isn't "the rules allow this." It's "trust me, bro, I wasn't acting as attorney general while the attorney general was on stage."

Then the Justice Department produced a memo making the whole thing official. Nothing says "I did nothing wrong" like a rapid-response policy rewrite that retroactively makes you right.

Pam Bondi Already Cracked the Door

None of this came out of nowhere. Former Attorney General Pam Bondi loosened the regulations during her tenure, allowing political appointees to attend rallies and fundraisers. The new memo goes a step further, and it does so with a notable bit of carve-out engineering.

It specifically says that presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed Justice Department employees are exempt from the stricter guidelines that still bind some other DOJ staff, such as administrative law judges and those in the Criminal Division. So the line is now drawn like this: the career folks who do the actual casework stay muzzled, while the political bosses at the top get to work the crowd.

If you wanted to design a rule that protects the people least likely to need protecting from politics, this would be it.

Why a Canvassing Prosecutor Should Scare You

Let's be concrete about who this covers. U.S. attorneys decide whom to charge. The FBI director decides whom to investigate. The attorney general sits on top of all of it. Those are the people who can ruin a candidate's year with a single announced probe.

Now those same officials can knock on doors for one party and serve as officers of that party. An investigation of a Democratic challenger lands differently when the person overseeing it was a convention delegate last month. An investigation of a Republican incumbent gets quietly shelved, and nobody can prove why.

The whole point of the old norm was that you never had to ask the question. Once the people holding the badge are openly working a campaign, you have to ask it about every case, forever.

PBS Found It, the Rest of Us Get to Live With It

PBS News was first to report the new guidelines, which tells you something about how loudly the Justice Department announced a change to its own political firewall. A memo that guts a decades-old independence norm went out and basically stayed in the building until a reporter found it.

That's usually how you can tell an institution knows what it's doing. When you're proud of a policy, you hold a press conference. When you send it around quietly the week before an election, you already know how it's going to look.