New acting AG plans to operate as Trump's personal lawyer

[marmar]

New acting AG plans to operate as Trump’s personal lawyer
In his first press conference, Todd Blanche made it clear he would do the president's bidding

By Heather Digby Parton
Columnist
Published April 9, 2026 9:20AM (EDT)


([bSalon) Pam Bondi’s tenure at the Department of Justice started out with such promise. She understood from the beginning that her job was to serve not as attorney general of the United States, but as attorney general of Donald Trump. She was his personal legal hit woman, and she took on the assignment with energy and enthusiasm.

....(snip)....

It’s unclear what exactly cooled Trump on Bondi, but we do know he was unhappy about her inability to stick it to his political enemies. But Trump will perhaps have better luck with the man he immediately named as his acting attorney general — Todd Blanche, Bondi’s deputy and yet another of Trump’s personal lawyers. On Tuesday, at his first press conference after taking office, Blanche proved that he is more than up to the task of flattering the president before the television cameras. When asked if he wanted to be named to the job permanently, he replied, “I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, ‘Thank you very much, I love you, sir.’”

That sort of sentiment is certainly appreciated by Trump, but it is insufficient in securing his regard. So Blanche, obviously seeking to learn from his predecessor’s mistakes, went on to make clear that he loyalty to the president comes first — ahead of the traditions and norms that have long been in place at the Justice Department, ahead of his duty to the country, ahead of any commitment to the rule of law.

....(snip)....

During his 14 months as Bondi’s deputy, Blanche presided over a full-scale purge of the Justice Department, which saw the firing of anyone with even the most tangential relationship to the investigations of Trump’s role in Jan. 6 and his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and his possession of classified documents after leaving office. He has made no bones about believing that any prosecutor who worked on those cases had behaved unethically and should have resigned. At the same time Blanche is defending Trump’s right to “get justice” against anyone he believes has wronged him, he is overtly punishing the department’s career prosecutors and FBI agents who were assigned to “get justice” for the president’s criminal behavior. .............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/04/09/new-acting-ag-plans-to-operate-as-trumps-personal-lawyer/

[LetMyPeopleVote]

1. Here is a good discussion of the ethical reasons why Blanche is wrong on the DOJ only representing trump

Blanche is claiming that the DOJ reports to and only represents trump which is why it is okay to target trump's enemies. That is wrong

Todd Blanche’s first press conference reveals DOJ’s new primary client: Trump www.ms.now/news/news-an...

— LaCiuraRaffaele (@laciuraraffaele.bsky.social) 2026-04-09T02:27:35.432Z

https://www.ms.now/news/news-analysis/todd-blanches-first-press-conference-reveals-dojs-new-primary-client-president-trump

It is undeniably true that no matter where in the United States an attorney practices, they owe a duty of loyalty and confidentiality to their clients. It is equally true that those duties persist long after the representation has concluded.

Yet ethical standards governing lawyers also provide that a lawyer for an organization — corporate, nonprofit or governmental — owes those duties to the organization itself, not any executive or employee.

That’s equally true of the federal government, former prosecutor and New York Law School professor Rebecca Roiphe told MS NOW.

“The entity that prosecutors represent — the government or the public — is not the same as the individual who is appointed or elected to run that entity,” she explained.

Roiphe, who has written about the ethical obligations of federal prosecutors, added, “The idea that there is an ethical conflict of interest if you were prosecuting the president is absurd. A lawyer for a corporation could easily cooperate with the government in prosecuting the CEO and no one would think those lawyers have a conflict of interest.”

And in a recent law review article with former federal prosecutor and Fordham Law School professor Bruce Green, who directs his school’s legal ethics program, Roiphe also observed that in representing the government itself, federal prosecutors have even more demanding obligations than in a standard attorney-client relationship.

As the Supreme Court noted in its 1935 opinion in Berger v. United States, “The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”

Put another way, as Roiphe and Green wrote, for federal prosecutors, “the public is the principal, not the President.”....

After all, Blanche also said yesterday that among the thousands of DOJ investigations and prosecutions underway, “it is true that some of them involve men, women, and entities that the President in the past has had issues with and that [he] believe[s] should be investigated. That is his right, and indeed, it is his duty to do that, meaning, to lead this country.”

The question now is this: If Trump is indeed the DOJ’s primary client, as Blanche suggested yesterday, can justice, as the Supreme Court conceived it, truly be done?

Blanche's view on ethics are simply wrong. I believe that Blanche should be disbarred after he leaves office