Quisling Spotlight: Todd Blanche

Still Representing the Same Client

Hawkeye1972

Jul 14, 2026

Todd Blanche is up for confirmation hearings this week. An appropriate time for a spotlight...

Blanche has a resume built for reassurance: eight years as a career prosecutor in the Southern District of New York’s violent crimes unit, a decade of white-collar defense work, a partner track that looked like the on-ramp to a judgeship, not a scandal.

Strip away the resume and look at what the Department has done under him since he was confirmed as Deputy Attorney General in March 2025, then elevated to Acting Attorney General in April 2026, and a different pattern appears.

Prosecuting the President’s enemies. Shielding his family, friends, and donors. Hollowing out everyone in between who might object. And promising to end “weaponization” while vigorously doing the opposite.

These are not metaphors. They are a sequence of documented actions.

From the Defense Table to the Building He Now Runs

Blanche’s last job before government was defending Donald Trump - one of three personal criminal defense lawyers in 2023-2024, including the Manhattan hush-money case that produced a felony conviction. Given that result, we thought we’d seen the last of him. When he took Trump as a client in April 2023, he was a Cadwalader partner; the firm’s reputational committee balked, so he resigned and founded his own boutique, Blanche Law, calling it an opportunity he “should not pass up.” Months later, Trump nominated him to be the Justice Department’s second-highest official.

This isn’t a technical conflict of interest - it’s the plain kind. The man who spent a year keeping Trump out of prison now decides whom else the Department prosecutes and whom it protects. When Pam Bondi was forced out in April 2026, Blanche became Acting Attorney General and inherited the whole building. In June, Trump nominated him to keep the job permanently.

Peter Carr, a former Jack Smith spokesman now with Justice Connection, watched Blanche defend Trump in two federal cases before writing, in The Contrarian:

“Blanche has never stopped acting as Donald Trump’s personal lawyer... He has used his position at DOJ to enter a corrupt deal with the president and his family, advance vindictive prosecutions, fire career employees, and attack the judiciary.”

The Sword: Reopening Cases Career Prosecutors Wouldn’t Touch

DOJ pursued charges against James Comey and New York AG Letitia James, both indicted by Lindsey Halligan, a former Trump aide with no prosecutorial experience installed specifically to bring cases career prosecutors had declined. A judge threw out both indictments in November 2025, ruling Halligan’s appointment unlawful. A grand jury later refused to reindict James - but in April 2026, DOJ brought Comey an entirely new indictment, this time over a 2025 Instagram post of seashells spelling “86 47,” while its appeal of the original dismissal is still pending. By late May, even the lead prosecutor on the shells case had stepped off it, and when Maurene Comey - a career prosecutor, and Comey’s daughter - was fired, DOJ argued in court the firing was valid “even if there were political motivations.” Not a denial. A legal argument that motive doesn’t matter.

The pattern extends further:

Blanche installed Trump loyalist Joseph DiGenova atop the investigation into former CIA Director John Brennan after the career prosecutor assigned to it was removed for doubting the case.
DOJ indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center, reportedly rushed through despite internal concerns.
It inserted itself into Trump’s own defamation fight with E. Jean Carroll, asking the Supreme Court to let DOJ handle his appeal, then opening a separate criminal inquiry into her lawsuit.
Blanche also pressured the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Western District of Virginia to investigate Biden officials over 2016 Russia documents - a case that career prosecutors didn’t think the evidence supported.
A federal court found DOJ leadership pressured Nashville prosecutors into the vindictive prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

By June, the pattern had spread to Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, AG Keith Ellison, and California Governor Gavin Newsom, with subpoenas a federal judge later found were “meant to coerce officials into assisting with immigration enforcement.” Along the way, DOJ’s own court filings began echoing Trump’s rhetoric - accusing a preservation group of “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” - and the Department subpoenaed Wall Street Journal reporters’ records before quietly withdrawing once it became public.

None of this is a Department pursuing evidence wherever it leads. It’s a Department starting with the target and working backward.

The Shield: Family, Friends, and Donors

The same Department that struggled to lawfully charge Trump’s critics moved fast to protect Trump, his family, and his January 6th allies.

DOJ moved to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leaders, then deleted its own press releases documenting Jan. 6 convictions as “partisan propaganda.”
It fired the agents and prosecutors who built those cases and the Jack Smith investigations.
In settling Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS, Blanche personally signed an addendum barring audits of Trump, his family, and his company - a shield he’s since confirmed to lawmakers remains in place.

The favors reach further.

In June 2026, Blanche’s office reportedly forced prosecutors to close a Clean Water Act investigation into coal companies owned by Sen. Jim Justice.
Blanche’s office separately shut down an investigation into a fraudster who’d paid at least $2.5 million to people close to the President before receiving a commutation.
Pam Bondi told the House Oversight Committee that Blanche was “in charge” of reviewing and releasing the Epstein files - putting Trump’s former personal lawyer in control of what the public got to see.

The Anti-Weaponization Fund

No episode better evokes 1984’s Ministry of Truth than the nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund,” which Blanche created as part of the Trump v. IRS settlement - ostensibly to compensate people targeted by “politicized” Biden-era investigations, while shielding Trump’s own taxes in the same stroke. A judge temporarily blocked it in May 2026 and reopened the underlying case to examine how it came about. Facing that scrutiny, Blanche told lawmakers the fund would “not move forward” - but has refused, repeatedly, to put the cancellation in writing, even as one of his own assistant attorneys general tried to file a claim against it and DOJ officials quietly explored other ways to pay off Trump loyalists.

The same day Blanche declared “the weaponization that happened under the Biden Administration will not happen again,” DOJ fired the attorneys who’d prosecuted violent clinic-blockade cases under the FACE Act. Ending weaponization, in practice, meant removing the prosecutors who protected abortion clinics - not weaponization itself.

Gutting What’s Left

Institutions don’t need to be abolished to be neutralized - they just need enough people who might say no to leave. More than 10,000 federal lawyers, roughly one in five, had departed by the end of May 2026 alone, part of a broader exodus reporting puts above 16,000 employees department-wide. The prosecutors and agents who built the January 6th and Trump investigations were disproportionately among those shown the door.

Why Is He Such a Quisling?

Many quislings we’ve profiled seem driven by money or power, but Blanche may be working out his own resentments - proving himself after losing the hush-money case as Trump’s lawyer, or settling something left over from Colorado, where his family had to leave after his father lost a basement-church zoning fight that went to the state Supreme Court.

The Bottom Line

Todd Blanche didn’t arrive at DOJ to check power. He arrived after a career spent keeping Trump out of legal jeopardy, and he’s run the Department like a defense lawyer runs a case: protect the client, discredit the opposition, bend the rules when they serve him.

The difference is that this client is the President, his resources are the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, and he’s now asking the Senate to let him keep the job for good.

His actions aren’t those of a public servant - they are those of a sycophant finishing the job he started at the defense table, with a bigger client list and a bigger budget.

Whether you think Trump is right to distrust the Justice Department or think he’s dismantling it for his own protection, the fact is the same either way: the Department is run by the man who used to defend him in court, and it treats his enemies and his friends very differently.

That is not independence. It is representation, continued by other means.

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Quislings@Substack

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