Todd Blanche has spent most of his career doing one job: keeping Donald Trump out of legal trouble. In 2023 he left a partnership at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft to become Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, leading his defense in the Stormy Daniels hush money case, the trial that ended in a conviction on 34 felony counts. Before that, he successfully defended Paul Manafort against mortgage fraud charges.
That is the résumé. Today Blanche is Acting Attorney General of the United States, nominated for the permanent job, running the one federal agency whose entire purpose is to investigate and prosecute people exactly like his former client.
He has not changed jobs. He has changed titles.
The Recusal He Signed and Ignored
Less than two weeks after Blanche became deputy attorney general in March 2025, the Justice Department’s own top ethics lawyer, Joseph Tirrell, formally briefed him that he needed to recuse himself from matters involving Trump in his personal capacity. Blanche had already signed an ethics pledge to that effect at his confirmation hearing.
He did not follow it. Sen. Adam Schiff has since opened an inquiry into Blanche’s disregard of his own department’s ethics directive. The pattern that inquiry describes is not a single lapse. It is the operating premise of his tenure.
Deciding Whether to Pay His Old Client
The clearest illustration of what that means in practice is almost too on the nose to invent. Trump has filed an administrative claim demanding the Justice Department pay him $230 million personally, compensation he says he is owed over the Russia investigation and the Mar-a-Lago search. The officials positioned to decide whether the government pays that claim are Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr., who represented Trump’s co-defendant in the documents case.
House Judiciary Democrats have demanded both men recuse themselves, arguing that a personal payout to a sitting president approved by his own former lawyers is not a gray area. Critics have gone further, noting that money flowing from the federal government into Trump’s own pocket runs directly into the Constitution’s Domestic Emoluments Clause, which bars a president from taking payments from the government beyond his fixed salary.
Whether the claim is paid is still an open question. That Trump’s own former defense attorney is one of the people who gets to answer it is not.
The Immunity Deal
The starkest example so far is not hypothetical. Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax information by an agency contractor. The Justice Department, meaning Blanche, settled that suit on Trump’s behalf, and the settlement did far more than resolve a leak complaint. In a one-page addendum, Blanche agreed that the government is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from pursuing any tax claim, known or unknown, against Trump, his two oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for anything predating the settlement.
A federal judge did not let that framing stand unchallenged. Reviewing the case, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams found that Trump had sued the IRS for an “improper purpose”: not to resolve a real dispute, but to manufacture the appearance of judicial legitimacy for a settlement that had already been negotiated. She referred Trump’s attorney in the case, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for possible discipline.
A sitting federal judge, reviewing the paperwork, concluded the entire lawsuit was theater staged to give a backroom deal the appearance of a court order. The Justice Department signed that deal anyway.
A Slush Fund, a Revolt, and a Very Small Concession
Attached to the settlement was a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, ostensibly for people who claim they were targeted for political reasons during the Biden administration, in practice a taxpayer-funded pool controlled by the same administration accused of the targeting. It was enough to provoke a genuine Senate Republican revolt: Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis refused to advance Blanche’s confirmation until it was gone.
Trump’s response was not to defend the fund on the merits. It was to attack Cornyn personally, posting on Truth Social that Cornyn “never had a problem” with the fund until Trump endorsed his primary opponent in Texas.
Facing the loss of two votes he needed, Blanche folded, but only just enough. He officially rescinded the $1.8 billion fund and narrowed the audit-immunity language to cover only Trump and his two sons, retroactively, rather than the sweeping “known or unknown,” “related or affiliated” language of the original deal. Cornyn and Tillis signed off. The confirmation fight is effectively over.
What survived the concession is the part that mattered. Trump’s own tax audit immunity remains in place. The slush fund was the part Republicans could see and object to. The personal protection underneath it was never on the table.
The Same Client, a Bigger Office
None of this is limited to Trump personally, either. ProPublica found that Blanche held at least $159,000 in crypto-related assets when he ordered an end to investigations into crypto companies and exchanges opened during the Biden administration. The habit of mind runs the same way regardless of whose money is on the table: decide first, disclose the conflict later, if at all.
But Trump is the client this Justice Department was actually built around. Blanche was hired once to keep him out of a courtroom, and got a conviction anyway. He was hired again, this time as the government itself, and every major decision of his tenure, the recusal he ignored, the $230 million claim he is positioned to approve, the IRS settlement a judge called theater, the slush fund he gave up only to save his own confirmation, has run in exactly one direction.
The title changed. The job did not.