WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Todd Blanche, a lawyer who led the legal team that defended the Republican during his hush-hush criminal trial, to serve as the Justice Department’s second-highest official.
Blanche, a former federal prosecutor, was a key figure in Trump’s defense team, both in the New York case that ended in a conviction in May and in the federal cases brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith .
“Todd is an outstanding attorney who will be a critical leader at the Department of Justice, fixing what has been a broken justice system for far too long,” Trump said in a statement announcing his pick on Thursday.
If Blanche is confirmed as deputy attorney general by the Republican-led Senate, he would run the day-to-day operations of the sprawling Justice Department, which Trump has promised to radically overhaul.
The announcement comes a day after the president-elect said that as attorney general, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump loyalist who once faced a Justice Department sex trafficking investigation that ended without charges.
Trump appoints two other members of his defense team to senior positions at the Justice Department.
Emil Bove, a former federal prosecutor, will be the top deputy attorney general and will serve as acting deputy attorney general until Blanche is confirmed, Trump said.
Trump appointed D. John Sauer, who successfully argued his presidential immunity case before the U.S. Supreme Court, as solicitor general, representing his administration before the Supreme Court. Sauer, who previously served as Missouri’s attorney general, was a Rhodes scholar and served as a law clerk on the Supreme Court for the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Blanche represented Trump in both the 2020 election interference case in Washington and the Florida case in which the former president was accused of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. In both cases, the defense team successfully established a legal strategy that focused heavily on delaying the cases until after the election.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the classified documents case last summer, ruling that Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of Smith was illegal. The 2020 election case stalled amid the row over Trump’s claims of immunity from prosecution, which went to the Supreme Court.
The Justice Department is now evaluating how to scale down the two prosecutions to comply with long-standing department policy that says sitting presidents cannot be indicted or prosecuted while in office.
Blanche also represented Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and succeeded in getting a mortgage fraud case against him dismissed in the same New York court where Trump was convicted. Blanche argued that the case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, was too similar to the case that landed Manafort in federal prison and therefore amounted to double jeopardy.
Blanche joined Trump’s defense team in the New York case just before his indictment in April 2023. Trump was accused of a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex. Trump was convicted of 34 crimes, although his lawyers are urging the judge to overturn the guilty verdict.
Blanche left the firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, where he was a partner in the White Collar Defense and Investigations practice, to start his own practice. Blanche told colleagues at Cadwalader that he was resigning to represent Trump. He joined the company in September 2017.
In an email announcing his departure, he wrote: “I have been asked to represent Trump in the recently indicted DA case, and after much consideration, I have decided that this is the best thing for me to do and an opportunity that I shouldn’t do. to pass by.”
Originally from the suburbs of Denver, Blanche graduated from American University in Washington, DC and Brooklyn Law School.
Blanche first joined the Department of Justice as a paralegal in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York while in law school.
He later clerked for federal judges and then was a prosecutor at the same U.S. attorney’s office for about eight years, covering Manhattan, the Bronx and the northern suburbs, and for two years as co-head of the office’s violent crimes unit.
Bove, a star lacrosse player in college, joined Blanche’s law firm last year and handled many key arguments in Trump’s lawsuits, including ongoing efforts to have the hush money conviction dismissed in light of his election victory. As a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Bove was involved in multiple high-profile prosecutions, including a drug trafficking case against the brother of the former Honduran president, a man who set fire to a pressure cooker in Manhattan and a man who sent dozens of mail bombs to prominent targets across the country.
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Sisak reported from New York.
