Trump nominates Todd Blanche as attorney general

Donald Trump has nominated Todd Blanche—his former defence lawyer and current acting attorney general—to serve permanently as US attorney general, according to The Guardian. Blanche has held the acting role since April, when Trump fired Pam Bondi after criticism of her handling of files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

The nomination hands the Justice Department to a figure whose recent public profile is less about managing a sprawling federal bureaucracy than about litigating Trump’s personal legal exposure. Blanche represented Trump in the hush-money case involving Stormy Daniels, in which Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts for falsifying business records, and also acted for him in the federal classified documents and election obstruction cases that did not proceed after Trump’s election victory, The Guardian reports. Senate confirmation is required, and Republicans hold a majority.

The White House pitch is that Blanche will reverse what he has described as “weaponization” of federal law enforcement. But the record described in The Guardian’s reporting is a set of concrete internal moves that narrow the department’s reach in ways that track the president’s interests: a memo permanently blocking the IRS from auditing or pursuing past tax claims against Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization; the creation of a large, secretive compensation fund for Trump allies; and the removal of Justice Department press releases about prosecutions of January 6 Capitol rioters. Under Blanche’s tenure as acting attorney general, federal prosecutors also unveiled criminal charges against former FBI director James Comey and escalated investigations into former CIA director John Brennan.

Democrats are treating the nomination as a test of whether the Senate will accept an attorney general whose professional identity is tightly coupled to the president. Senator Adam Schiff, a member of the Senate judiciary committee and a former federal prosecutor, said the Senate should “vigorously oppose” Blanche’s confirmation, according to The Guardian’s live coverage. Schiff and other Democrats argue that decisions such as pursuing Comey—over an Instagram photo showing seashells arranged to read “86 47”—look less like conventional law enforcement priorities than like message discipline enforced through prosecutorial power.

For European governments, the immediate question is not American political etiquette but operational predictability. The US Justice Department is a key counterpart on sanctions enforcement, extradition, intelligence-related prosecutions and cross-border corporate cases. When leadership choices signal that internal controls and conflict-of-interest boundaries are negotiable, foreign partners have to price in the risk that cooperation becomes conditional—subject to domestic political loyalty tests, or to shifting definitions of who counts as an adversary.

Blanche told NBC News that his agenda includes making America safe and addressing “weaponization” of the justice system. The Senate now has to decide whether the same department can credibly claim neutrality while its top official is picked from the president’s former legal defence team.