Pam Bondi was the worst AG in history. Until now.
Todd Blanche, it’s your turn.
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Pam Bondi has a strong claim to being the most corrupt and subservient attorney general in US history. So when Trump fired her in April, there was an outpouring of bipartisan celebration. Everyone from Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu to bottom-feeding MAGA influencer Matt Walsh rushed to say that Bondi was incompetent and compromised, and that the nation was better off without her.
Unfortunately but predictably, Trump did not fire Bondi for being corrupt and subservient. He seems to have fired her, instead, for not being corrupt and subservient enough.
Trump’s choice to replace her is not a more independent or accomplished attorney. Instead, he selected as Bondi’s successor his own former lawyer, Todd Blanche — a man who has spent the period since Bondi’s departure attempting to show that he can, somehow, contort himself into even more humiliating postures of drooling obedience than his predecessor.
Whether Blanche can get confirmed given the current mutinous spirit in the Republican-controlled Senate is uncertain. But one thing is clear; Bondi’s failures were failures that Trump wanted and indeed demanded. If a minimally competent and principled attorney general is appointed during Trump’s term, it will be despite his furious efforts. That’s because one of the absolute core goals of his presidency is the perversion of justice and the destruction of the rule of law.
Job description: Do boss’s bidding
Trump does not want an attorney general who will administer the law in a free and fair fashion. He does not even want an attorney general who shares his policy preferences and will pursue them aggressively. He wants an attorney general who will act as his personal advocate and henchthug, putting his goals, grudges, cashflow, and whims above the good of the country.
Bondi knew the assignment, and she was eager to crawl on her belly and kiss ass in the wormlike manner Trump requires.
During her tenure, Bondi aggressively worked to end cases against those who Trump believed would be political allies (like then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams) and to prosecute those Trump believed to be his personal and political enemies (like Newark Mayor Ras Baraka and former FBI Director James Comey). She gutted white-collar criminal enforcement to benefit the wealthy oligarchs who Trump sees as his core constituency.
Bondi performed for Trump on television, spewing rabid partisan talking points to try to discredit congressional Democrats to whom, under the Constitution, she was supposed to be accountable — like when she called Rep. Jamie Raskin a “washed up loser lawyer.”
That attack on Raskin came in a hearing on the Epstein files — the issue that more than any other led to Bondi’s downfall. Much of the right believed that the release of the Epstein files would implicate Democrats like Bill Clinton. But Epstein was in fact besties for years with one Donald Trump. One woman has accused Trump of raping her in Epstein’s home when she was 13.
Congress passed legislation requiring complete release of the files relating to Epstein. But the Department of Justice under Bondi control failed to release some 2.5 million files, and 3.5 million released pages were heavily redacted. It looked like a coverup, and it destroyed her reputation across the political spectrum. When Bondi stepped down, erratic right-wing South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, who had pushed for the release of the files, expressed hope that EPA administrator Lee Zeldin, a former congressperson with nominally more stature than Bondi, would become the next AG.
Why not worse?
But Zeldin was not Trump’s pick. Instead, Trump appointed Blanche as acting attorney general, and last week he asked the Senate to confirm Blanche as AG.
Blanche is not the attorney general you select when you want a sharp break with Pam Bondi. He is the attorney general you choose when you want an attorney general who is more Pam Bondi than Pam Bondi.
A former attorney for the Southern District of New York, Blanche oozed into Trump’s orbit in 2019 when he began to defend his campaign flak Paul Manafort from New York state charges. By 2023, he was defending Trump himself in his hush money payment trial, and eventually in all of the high profile cases against him.
Blanche claimed prior to the 2024 election that he was not representing Trump in pursuit of a government job. Either he reconsidered or he was just lying; either way, soon after entering office, Trump moved to find a place for his loyalist lawyer. Blanche was confirmed as deputy attorney general in March 2025, and quickly went about helping Bondi turns the DOJ into Trump’s personal plaything.
Blanche personally put federal prosecutors involved in the Eric Adams corruption case on leave. He fired pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer after she refused to sign off on restoring gun rights to actor, Trump-supporter, and domestic abuser Mel Gibson. He ordered the arrest of Mayor Baraka after Baraka attempted to conduct an oversight visit at the Delaney Hall ICE concentration camp. And in a perhaps more personal move, Blanche gutted cryptocurrency enforcement while he himself held more than $150,000 in crypto investments.
Blanche was also up to his puckered lips in the DOJ’s Epstein file manipulations. In her testimony before the House Oversight Committee last week, Bondi claimed Blanche was in fact the one with “oversight” of Epstein files releases and redactions. Bondi insisted she was praising Blanche’s work. But the upshot is that Blanche, according to Bondi, was ultimately responsible for the most controversial and despised aspect of her much despised tenure.
It’s not exactly a revelation that Blanche was closely involved with the Epstein scandal. Last summer he orchestrated a much-reported meeting with Epstein’s convicted and imprisoned accomplice in child abuse, Ghislaine Maxwell. In preparation for that conversation, he allowed her attorney to read grand jury transcripts, even though those might help her with her appeal.
After Maxwell and Blanche chatted, Maxwell was moved to a minimum-security prison; Blanche claimed this was done in order to protect her from unspecified “threats.” Others were skeptical. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, for example, said that it looked like Blanche was offering Maxwell favors and special treatment as part of a “corrupt deal so that she can exonerate Donald Trump.”
Audience of one
Since his appointment as acting attorney general two months ago, Blanche has doubled down on his efforts to show Trump that he is the loyalest of all possible loyalists, a MAGA hat of a man with neither spine nor heart nor soul of his own.
Under Blanche the DOJ opened an investigation into former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, who testified about Trump’s disgraceful efforts to stage a coup on January 6. It also opened an investigation into the Southern Poverty Law Center, a venerable civil rights organization.
And Blanche has said he’s working on setting up “roadblocks” to prevent Democrats from prosecuting Trump after his term is over.
Blanche’s most extreme and embarrassing acts of self-debasement, however, have involved Trump’s coup slush fund.
As Liz Dye reported in Public Notice last week, the so-called “anti-weaponization fund” would transfer $1.776 billion from the Treasury Judgment Fund to a private entity controlled entirely by Blanche. The fund could then be used to provide payouts to people who believe they were unfairly targeted by the Biden administration.
Trump has made it clear that he particularly wants to reward people involved in the January 6 coup. As an extra bonus, the IRS has pledged not to audit the tax returns of Trump and his family, and to drop pending litigation — possibly saving Trump from paying a $100 million penalty.
Blanche — who again, would be in charge of the coup slush fund — has been its most vocal public proponent. He’s defended the fund publicly before the Senate Appropriations Committee and refused to rule out that payouts might go to Trump donors or to January 6 insurrectionists who assaulted police. He also fought for it to be included in the GOP’s reconciliation bill funding ICE and Border Patrol. His advocacy led to a bitter, dramatic private meeting in which Republican senators yelled that he was advocating for open corruption — and pushing them to take votes that would damage them badly in the midterms.
The revolt of the GOP caucus, and key court losses, have derailed the fund — at least for the moment. But Blanche’s eagerness to abandon any pretense of ethics has done its work in that it has secured him the nomination he coveted.
The contortions involved in Blanche’s abasement may ultimately backfire; the senators who were dressing him down are the same ones he needs to vote for his confirmation. John Fetterman, the furthest right Democratic senator, has already said he won’t vote for Blanche. John Cornyn, a usually reliable MAGA vote on the Judiciary Committee, has said that Blanche “needs to answer some questions for me.” Other Trump nominees have been forced to withdraw from lack of Senate support, so Blanche’s confirmation is by no means assured.
Whether he becomes attorney general or not, though, Blanche has made clear what qualities Trump prizes in his appointees — complete loyalty, open corruption, contempt for any principle superseding the brain burps of God Emperor Trump. MAGA wants attorney generals who are unfit to be attorney generals. Only hollowed-out, lawless fascists need apply.
That’s it for today
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Can not wait til the Dems control government again…. And make these scumbags sing! Down with MAGA.
Corruption in the administraton of Justice is one of the worst misfortunes that can befall a nation. The US under Trump 2.0 has it in spades.
Under this regime the US has indeed become a light on a hill. A terrible warning to other democracies about what to avoid.