Last Sunday, on Meet the Press, Kristen Welker asked the new attorney general of the United States a question every one of his predecessors, in both parties, has answered roughly the same way: will you pledge that the Justice Department will always act independently of the White House?
You’re supposed to say yes, it will.
At least Todd Blanche was honest enough not to lie to our faces.
“No, I’m not going to pledge that,” Todd Blanche said. Instead, he made a different offer: “I will act with integrity.”
Every attorney general since Watergate has at least performed independence from the presidency.
Some meant it, and some didn’t, but they all knew they were supposed to say it.
Blanche is the first to decline entirely. Mona Charen, of The Bulwark, calls that his one honest promise.
So let’s take Blanche at his word, and look at what the department has done under him.
Blanche spent nine years as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, then got famous as Trump’s lead defense lawyer in the hush-money trial. Trump made him deputy attorney general in January 2025.
On April 2, Trump fired Pam Bondi. He’d been unhappy, per the reporting, with her handling of the Epstein files.
And he’d been frustrated with the department’s “failure to successfully prosecute several of the president’s political enemies.”
Are you aware of how batshit crazy that is? An attorney general of the United States lost her job partly for *not prosecuting enough *of the president’s enemies.
Blanche took over that same day, and on August 8 the Senate confirmed him 50-49 overnight. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski joining every Democrat against him, though it didn’t matter much: the votes were already there.
Now the president’s personal criminal defense lawyer now runs the department that once prosecuted him.
Why did Blanche refuse to pledge independence from the president? Well, Blanche told Welker: “If President Trump says, ‘I want the Department of Justice to go after every violent criminal in this country,’ which is what he has said, what you’re saying to me is I should say, ‘No, sir, I’m not going to do it.’”
That’s a bullshit excuse.
I spent two decades of my life as a cop, and I locked up many violent criminals. That work is done by city cops, county detectives, and local prosecutors.
And I can tell you who isn’t involved: well, the president. He’s supposed to have more important things to do.
The feds handle about 2 percent of violent crime. Every prosecutor in America knows that, including Blanche. After all, he was one for nine years.
So Blanche’s cover story isn’t even particularly compelling.
In February, at a meeting of the leaders of all 93 U.S. Attorneys’ offices, Blanche’s associate deputy, Aakash Singh, told federal prosecutors that Trump is their “chief client,” per Bloomberg Law. Anyone unwilling to support the president’s agenda, he said, should step aside.
Then, in March, Blanche said the department had fired more than 200 prosecutors and agents who worked on the Trump investigations.
“Not a single man or woman” who’d investigated the president, he said, remained.
Then, in May, he signed an agreement barring the IRS from auditing Trump, his family, or his company.
Two months later, a federal judge ruled the deal collusive, calling Blanche’s testimony about it “misleading and disingenuous.” The judge then proceeded to refer him to the state bar.
The chief law-enforcement officer of the United States, in other words, had been referred to the bar for misleading a court. Then, four weeks later, the Senate voted to confirm him anyway.
Then there’s January 6th.
In April, the department moved to vacate the seditious-conspiracy convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders.
Then, in May, it announced the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” for convicted rioters, refusing to rule out payouts to defendants convicted of assaulting police. That same month, it deleted its own press releases on the January 6th prosecutions, calling its own prosecutors’ work “partisan propaganda.”
Welker asked Blanche about this, too.
She played him a clip of himself pledging to prosecute anyone who assaults a federal officer “to the fullest extent of the law,” then asked how that squares with pardons for the 172 Capitol rioters who pleaded guilty to assaulting police.
“There’s nothing inconsistent about that,” he said.
It’s fucking obscene, and he said it without blinking.
He also told her the fund is “dead,” though he declined to guarantee the men who beat those cops won’t get compensated anyway.
And the Department of Justice’s enemies file keeps growing.
In April, a U.S. Attorney indicted James Comey for threatening the president. Their only evidence of the threat is an Instagram photo of seashells arranged as “86 47.”
But 86 can mean “throw out,” not just kill, and is protected speech, anyway.
Comey has good company. There’s Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Adam Schiff, Letitia James, and former CIA director John Brennan, whose probe is now run by Joe diGenova, another former Trump personal lawyer.
And in December, a federal court threw out the charges against Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a vindictive prosecution, citing Blanche’s own statements.
In Washington, meanwhile, after Jeanine Pirro’s office admitted its Reflecting Pool indictment rested on false information, Trump publicly demanded the department reconsider dropping it.
And as deputy AG, Blanche personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. She was moved to a minimum-security facility afterward. The administration hasn’t yet explained that one.
MAGA will say that that every administration politicizes justice. Okay, let’s compare.
Merrick Garland’s Justice Department indicted Senator Bob Menendez, Congressman Henry Cuellar, Mayor Eric Adams, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, and Hunter Biden, the sitting president’s own son. These guys were all Democrats.
And on the Trump cases, Garland was so worried about the appearances of impropriety that he handed them to a special counsel. Biden’s end-of-term family pardons were wrong, yes, but they’re also not in the same universe.
Blanche’s department, meanwhile, fired everyone who ever investigated the president, and then proceeded to indict a critic over seashells.
Blanche keeps saying Trump would never cross a legal line. But, since April, his department has faced a collusion ruling and a dismissal over vindictive prosecution. Meanwhile, Blanche himself has been referred to the bar.
The Justice Department has one client, and it isn’t the man Todd Blanche used to bill by the hour. It’s us, the citizens of the United States of America. Welker asked Todd Blanche to pledge that himself, and you heard his answer.
