President Donald Trump’s goal for the Department of Justice is to eliminate its traditional independence in favor of a gangster government in which he and his allies can do what they wish without fear of legal consequences while his enemies face zealous pretextual prosecution. He has been aided every step of the way by MAGA media that demand his federal law enforcement officials privilege personal loyalty to the president over any other ethical or moral standard, and seek their removal when they fail to live up to it. 

Trump and his propagandists seem to have finally gotten their man in Todd Blanche, whose attorney general confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee begin Wednesday. 

Blanche’s view is that the president — not the United States — should be seen as the Justice Department’s client. In a June interview on Trump shill Sean Hannity’s podcast, he criticized DOJ officials during Trump’s first term for “actively working against” the president by investigating him, saying, “They work for him, and make no mistake, everybody in the executive works for the president of the United States.” And his own record bears that out.

A MAGA made man who established his bona fides representing cronies like Paul Manafort and Boris Epshteyn, Blanche became principal lawyer for Trump himself between his presidential terms. As other Trump attorneys quit in the face of the then-former president’s numerous federal and state prosecutions, Blanche stayed loyal, took on more responsibility, and ultimately helped Trump avoid accountability. Trump, upon his return to the White House, rewarded his personal lawyer by appointing him deputy attorney general and, in April, acting attorney general. 

At the DOJ, Blanche oversaw some of the most notoriously political prosecutions of the era. His installment as acting attorney general was followed by the spurious indictments of longtime MAGA targets, including James Comey and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the appointment of MAGA media fixture Joe diGenova at the helm of a sprawling “Grand Conspiracy” inquiry into Trump’s political enemies. 

He’s also served as Trump’s all-purpose fixer. It was Blanche who got the call to interview Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell in prison; after Maxwell asserted that she never saw Trump “in any inappropriate setting,” she was transferred to a minimum-security prison camp where she reportedly receives special privileges (former Attorney General Pam Bondi, who drew condemnations from MAGA media figures over the Justice Department's Epstein disclosures, later testified that Blanche had overseen their release). And it was Blanche who became the point man for Trump’s scheme to have the DOJ establish a $1.8 billion slush fund that could be used to pay off January 6 insurrectionists. 

Blanche and Hannity use the same playbook to target Trump's perceived enemies

As he ascended within the Trump orbit, Blanche became a Fox News regular — with 23 appearances on its weekday programs since the start of the second Trump presidency — and a favorite of MAGA media stars like Hannity, who is now on the cusp of getting the attorney general of his dreams. 

The Fox star has spent the last decade leading furious dual efforts by MAGA media to A) defend Trump from federal probes related to Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, his efforts to subvert the 2020 election, and his retention of government documents at Mar-a-Lago, and B) seek retaliatory criminal probes of prominent Democrats and law enforcement officials tied in some way to those investigations.

Hannity’s buddy-buddy podcast interview with Blanche featured him asking about the “grand conspiracy, which goes back 11 years of whether or not you had powerful, high-ranking government officials conspiring to take down Donald Trump,” and the would-be attorney general agreeing that such a conspiracy existed and the question is simply whether it was “just a deep state actor who is working within the system that we've created for destruction, or is there a crime that's being committed.” 

“We're investigating,” he assured Hannity. “We have a bunch of guys investigating. Anybody, honestly, any prosecutor in this government that raises their hand and says, I want to find out what happened. I want to investigate. We have the tools in place to get them where they need to be to do it.”

The “grand conspiracy” probe is rooted in right-wing media fantasies and will likely fizzle — even Blanche stressed to Hannity that “we know everything you're talking about is true” but “we have to have prosecutors” prove a crime was committed with evidence and “it’s not easy to do that.” But it won’t be for lack of effort from Blanche or his team.

The episode concluded with this disclaimer, presumably written by Fox lawyers nervous about the vast array of figures discussed during the podcast as potential criminal targets:

The ash heap of past Trump attorneys general

Blanche’s path forward if he is confirmed as attorney general will be precarious. His predecessors have been mauled by judges and juries when they tried to follow right-wing media demands for politicized prosecutions, or by that commentariat — and Trump — for purportedly refusing to make those cases.

Jeff Sessions, Trump’s first attorney general in his first term, met Trump’s loyalist qualification for the post as the first senator to endorse his 2016 presidential campaign. He also shared Trump’s anti-immigrant fervor and history of racist invective.

But Sessions was nonetheless hounded by the right-wing media throughout his tenure for being insufficiently willing to use the DOJ to protect Trump and destroy his enemies. Fox host Jeanine Pirro denounced him to the president during an Oval Office meeting for failing to pursue the Uranium One pseudoscandal, and she and other Fox Trumpists called for his removal for recusing himself from the Russia probe, a campaign that eventually succeeded when Trump demanded his resignation. 

William Barr, Sessions’ eventual replacement, seemed like an even better fit for the post: A conservative hardliner, he had helped President George H.W. Bush weather the Iran-Contra scandal during a past stint as attorney general, and was on the record minimizing the Russia probe and pushing for a Clinton one. Fox commentators lauded the pick, with Hannity urging Barr to investigate an array of nefarious “deep state actors” and Democratic politicians and crowing that a reckoning was underway.

Barr was willing to corrupt the Justice Department to help the president’s friends, shield Trump from scandals, and target Trump’s foes. But his politicized prosecutions ultimately came to naught — the much-vaunted federal criminal investigation into the Russia probe failed to garner prison time for a single person. And Barr ultimately fell out of favor with Trump and was forced out for not politicizing the DOJ enough. He infuriated the president by following department policy and not announcing that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son Hunter was under investigation, and publicly refuting Trump’s claims of massive fraud following the 2020 election. 

When Barr stepped down in December 2020, it triggered a power struggle at the Justice Department. Acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen, who previously served as Barr’s deputy, refused Trump’s repeated efforts to get the DOJ to interfere with the 2020 presidential election. The president then considered replacing him with DOJ lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who supported subverting the election, ultimately backing down when it became clear that the rest of the top DOJ leadership would resign.

Trump campaigned on “retribution” in 2024, and upon his return to office, picked former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to oversee it at the Justice Department. A longtime Trump supporter who represented him during his first impeachment trial and a Fox favorite, Bondi treated the DOJ as the president’s “personal law firm,” oversaw a series of pretextual prosecutions of Trump foes, and instigated an exodus from the department of those who disagreed.

But Bondi lost the president’s support because federal judges and grand juries kept rejecting the political prosecutions he demanded. And she bore the brunt of the criticism from MAGA media for the calamitous handling of the Epstein case, with some calling for her removal. Ultimately, Trump pushed her out and gave Blanche the job. 

Blanche is the latest resident of the attorney general’s office — but even if he wins confirmation, he may not be the last of Trump’s second term. What won’t change is Trump’s desire for an attorney general who will make the DOJ an arm of his will, which means that anyone willing to take the job should be summarily disqualified.