TODD BLANCHE

Every operator in this network holds a chokepoint. Blanche holds the file room, the prosecutor's chair, and a claim on the Library, and the method is visible in the arrangement itself: don't destroy the accountability machinery, occupy every seat in it. Robert Jackson warned in 1940 that the most dangerous power of the prosecutor is that "he will pick people that he thinks he should get." The New York City Bar quoted that line in its opposition letter. A federal judge in Tennessee cited the same principle dismissing a case Blanche started. When the bar and the bench independently reach for the same 86-year-old warning about the same man, the warning has become a description.

Who He Is

Denver-born preacher's kid, Brooklyn Law night program while working as an SDNY paralegal, clerkships with Judges Chin and Bianco, then back to SDNY as a prosecutor from 2006 to 2014, rising to co-chief of the violent crimes unit, where his colleagues included Alvin Bragg, the future Manhattan DA who would convict his future client. WilmerHale in 2014, Cadwalader partner in September 2017, where he won the Manafort mortgage-fraud defense in 2019 and represented Igor Fruman and Boris Epshteyn. In April 2023 he resigned the partnership Cadwalader wouldn't let him keep with Trump as a client, founded Blanche Law, and became lead defense counsel in the Manhattan hush-money trial (convicted, 34 counts, May 2024), the federal classified documents case, and the federal election obstruction case. The prosecutions ended when the client won the election. The client brought his lawyer inside: DAG nomination November 14, 2024, confirmed March 6, 2025 on a 52 to 46 party-line vote, named acting Librarian of Congress May 12, 2025, elevated to acting attorney general April 2, 2026, the day Trump fired Pam Bondi (D-006), reportedly over her handling of the Epstein files.

What He's Doing

Five parallel operations, each documented below. One: holding the top of DOJ indefinitely through the Attorney General Succession Act while a delayed confirmation runs on a parallel, optional track. Two: the Trump v. IRS settlement architecture, the $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund and the family tax-immunity addendum, voided by a federal judge as collusive, with the immunity contract asserted to survive the fund's death. Three: administering the Epstein file release the department has been found noncompliant on, from the Maxwell interviews he conducted personally through the 3 million withheld pages. Four: receiving the criminal referral against Jack Smith, the prosecutor he opposed as Trump's defense lawyer. Five: a prosecutorial program against the president's adversaries that has already produced one dismissal for presumed vindictiveness with Blanche named in the order as its source.

What's Next

The confirmation vote, delayed July 23, which § 508 renders optional. The Torrez deadline, July 31, six days out, which the 31-page production has already answered in substance. The Sullivan contempt ruling, which will decide whether a federal court can fine the acting attorney general into producing documents. And the IG, GAO, and D.C. Circuit tracks, each testing the same proposition from a different angle: whether any external body can compel this department to produce anything it does not want to produce.

The Read

Bondi's method was the denominator: control the universe of relevant facts. Blanche inherited the denominator and added the courtroom. He controls both tables in every case that matters, plaintiff and defendant, prosecutor and defense, records custodian and records requester, interviewer and exonerating witness. Judge Williams put it in a published order: the parties were "never actually adverse." That is not a description of one lawsuit. That is the operating system.

Blanche's tenure rests on 28 U.S.C. § 508, the Attorney General Succession Act, which moves the deputy attorney general into the AG's chair on a vacancy with no time limit in the text. The closest precedent is a 1975 Eighth Circuit holding that a § 508 acting attorney general was not subject to the 30-day clock of the older vacancies statute. The modern template is Julie Su: a deputy serving as acting secretary indefinitely as a forever nominee, a maneuver built by a Democratic administration and blessed by GAO. Blanche is running the same play at Justice. The Senate can delay his confirmation forever; it cannot remove him by doing so.

The second office is a claim under injunction, and the contested occupancy is itself the fact. On May 8, 2025, Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden by email, mid-way through her ten-year Senate-confirmed term; her deputy Robert Newlen assumed the acting role under Library of Congress Regulation 1-120. Trump instead declared Blanche acting Librarian on May 12, and named DAG chief of staff Brian Nieves acting Deputy Librarian and Associate DAG Paul Perkins acting Register of Copyrights. DOJ officials arriving to take the posts were refused entry. Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter, fired two days after Hayden, sued on May 22; the D.C. Circuit found Blanche's appointment likely unlawful on September 10, 2025 and enjoined her removal; and on June 30, 2026 the Supreme Court denied the administration's stay application in a two-sentence unsigned order, expressly not reaching the merits, one day after reshaping removal power in Slaughter and Cook. The government's own filings still caption him "Acting Librarian of Congress." The Library says Newlen. Both cannot be true, and the unresolved question, whether a president can install an executive officer atop a legislative-branch agency, is the constitutional line this operator's career keeps crossing.

Why the Library matters to this network: it houses the Copyright Office and the DMCA triennial rulemaking, and Perlmutter was fired one day after her office circulated a report finding that some tech-firm uses of copyrighted works to train generative AI may be unlawful. Her lawyers say the report is why she was fired. The claimed third hat is an information-vector chokepoint with an AI-industry motive attached, sitting in the same portfolio as the Epstein file custody. Congress noticed: H.R. 6028, the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act, which would move the Librarian's appointment to a bipartisan congressional commission and strip the Librarian's authority over the Copyright Office, passed the House June 8, 2026.

And the third office is the recursion: because he remains the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general while serving as acting attorney general, the succession chart's answer to who checks the AG at the deputy level is Blanche. The deputy listed under him is himself.

In January 2026, Trump and his two eldest sons sued the IRS, an agency Trump controls, for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns. The Justice Department, which Trump also controls, defended the case in name only: per the June 22 grievance complaint filed with the New York Attorney Grievance Committee, neither Blanche nor any government attorney ever appeared in the case, and the settlement agreement was never submitted to the court.

On May 18, 2026, Blanche announced the settlement: a formal apology to Trump, protection from IRS audits of past returns for Trump, his family, and his businesses, and a $1,776,000,000 Anti-Weaponization Fund drawn from the Treasury's Judgment Fund to pay individuals claiming they were subjected to weaponization and lawfare, the dollar figure chosen for the year on the merch. Blanche also signed an addendum purporting to immunize Trump and related individuals from tax-return prosecution. Lawmakers in both parties identified the fund as a mechanism to pay January 6 participants with taxpayer money.

The collapse came in stages. In late May, after 35 former federal judges asked her to probe whether a fraud had been perpetrated on the court, Judge Kathleen Williams in the Southern District of Florida opened the inquiry; Judge Leonie Brinkema moved against the fund in the Eastern District of Virginia, and an order barred it indefinitely. At his July confirmation hearing Blanche declared the fund dead. Senator Cornyn then read the settlement back to him: Trump has not agreed in writing to kill the fund, and the settlement remains an enforceable contract. Blanche acknowledged Trump's attorneys "could try to enforce the contract." The fund is dead orally and alive contractually.

On July 13, Williams voided the settlement in a 56-page order finding the suit was brought for an improper purpose, to gain judicial legitimacy for a settlement with "no viable basis in law or fact." She found the parties worked in tandem and were "never actually adverse," citing Blanche's own public statements as proof he could speak for, and bind, both sides. She referred Trump lawyer Alejandro Brito to the Florida bar, barred Daniel Z. Epstein from the district for a year, and sent the opinion to the New York bar, where Blanche faces pending disciplinary proceedings, and the D.C. bar, where Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward is admitted.

Note what survived: the immunity addendum and the enforceable contract. The fund died in public. The family's protection was the point.

The Epstein Files Transparency Act, P.L. 119-38 (H.R. 4405), signed November 19, 2025, gave the department 30 days: a hard deadline of December 19, 2025. On the deadline the department released a first batch widely described as short on new information and simultaneously announced it would not release everything, placing itself in open violation of a law the president had signed. The violation ran more than 40 days.

On January 30, 2026, Blanche, then still deputy AG, announced the mass release: roughly 3.5 million total pages, more than 2,000 videos, 180,000 images, a review he described as "two Eiffel Towers" of documents by more than 500 attorneys and reviewers. He declared the review over and repeated it on February 2. The release was immediately marred by catastrophic redaction failures in the wrong direction: dozens of nude photographs and identifying details of victims published, while notable individuals went unredacted elsewhere. Victims' lawyers told the court the botched redactions had "damaged the lives of nearly 100 victims." The department agreed on February 3 to fix thousands of documents. At his confirmation hearing Blanche formally apologized for the redaction failures.

Roughly 3 million pages of the approximately 6 million collected remain withheld, characterized as duplicates across the SDNY and SDFL investigations, privileged material, statutorily excluded depictions of violence, and unrelated documents. Massie and Khanna, EFTA's co-sponsors, call the withholding deliberate, after viewing unredacted files under conditions Raskin described precisely: a DOJ annex, four DOJ-owned computers, clunky DOJ software, DOJ staffers watching over their shoulders. Add Bondi's burn book, the consultation of lawmakers' search histories, and the viewing room is the denominator signature in physical form: control what is counted, control who reads, log the readers.

The compulsion tracks: journalist Katie Phang sued in April for a brazen and ongoing violation of the Act. On June 25, Judge Emmet Sullivan found Blanche had never disputed the core claims, missing the deadline, improper redactions, withheld required documents, and ordered production by July 2 of the FBI interview notes concerning a woman alleging Trump assaulted her as a minor, emails to Epstein with senders unredacted including the torture-video exchanges, and documents naming potential co-conspirators. Phang has moved for contempt and a $1,000-per-day fine; Blanche's July reply calls the motion "absurd"; Sullivan has not ruled. The fine is sought, not imposed; the noncompliance finding already stands. In parallel: the DOJ IG audit announced April 23 by Deputy IG William Blier performing the duties of the Inspector General; the GAO review, requested March 11 and accepted April 28, which reaches the role of political appointees in redaction approvals and in removing published records from the DOJ website; and the legislative response, H.R. 9694, the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, introduced July 15 by Massie, Khanna, Leger Fernández, Merkley, and Luján. EFTA II creates a private right of action for state AGs, DAs, members of Congress, and victims; gives victims their own unredacted records including FD-302s; criminalizes concealment and falsification by DOJ and FBI personnel; mandates unredacted production to state prosecutors; prohibits invoking common-law privileges including deliberative process; and carries a discharge petition if the House sits on it for seven legislative days. The bill is drafted clause by clause against the exact wall this department built.

On July 24 and 25, 2025, the deputy attorney general of the United States personally conducted a nine-hour, two-day interview of Ghislaine Maxwell in Tallahassee. Former SDNY prosecutor Sarah Krissoff: you would generally never interview a cooperating witness without law enforcement in the room. Whether FBI agents were present has never been confirmed or denied. Maxwell's lawyer, David Oscar Markus, is a personal friend of Blanche, who appeared on Markus's podcast in June 2024 and called him a friend on air.

Per transcripts released August 22, 2025, Maxwell, questioned about roughly 100 individuals, told Blanche she never saw Trump act inappropriately, knew of no client list, and had nothing harmful to the president. The president's former defense lawyer personally generated the public record in which the file's central living witness exonerates his former client.

One week after the interviews, on August 1, 2025, the Bureau of Prisons transferred Maxwell to minimum-security FPC Bryan, a placement BOP's own rules bar for sex offenders absent a waiver only the Designation and Sentence Computation Center administrator can grant. BOP confirmed a waiver was granted and will not say who approved it or why. The oversight chain has produced nothing: Whitehouse and Durbin wrote Blanche in July 2025 seeking a commitment that no pardon or commutation would be traded for cooperation with the White House's political goals; Whitehouse demanded the transfer records from BOP on August 7, 2025, with an August 28 deadline; Whitehouse, Blumenthal, and Schiff filed FOIA requests in November 2025 after the silence; Ross and Raskin demanded the redesignation paperwork March 2, 2026; and Whitehouse's June 23, 2026 follow-up to Blanche and Marshall records the score, nearly ten months, no answer, FOIA unanswered too, and sets July 10. The Senate letters also anchor the client link in the file itself: the Wall Street Journal reported Maxwell assembled a birthday book for Epstein containing a personal note from Trump.

Then the rulebook changed. On May 6, 2026, a month after Blanche became acting attorney general, BOP updated its internal guidance to state that the attorney general can supersede BOP to designate or redesignate the place of a prisoner's imprisonment at will. The Maxwell transfer required a waiver from a specific administrator whose identity the bureau still will not disclose. Rather than answer that question, the system was rewritten so the acting attorney general personally holds the placement power going forward. Don't request the exception. Become the rule.

The predicate is a broken deal, and the department's own release proves it. Record EFTA01681971, produced under EFTA, documents the 2019 agreement between the New Mexico AG's office under Hector Balderas and the SDNY: New Mexico stops its interviews and refers everything to SDNY, and SDNY refers any state matter back to New Mexico at the conclusion of its case. On September 17, 2019, New Mexico shipped its entire investigative file to SDNY prosecutor Maurene Comey. The SDNY case concluded with Maxwell's 2022 conviction. The referral back never came. Balderas, in a July 20, 2026 letter to Torrez, calls it a clear breach of the prosecutorial agreement and says it bolsters the state's standing to sue.

Torrez (CO-001) reopened the investigation February 19, 2026 after the mass release surfaced the state's exposure, including the unverified Aragon tip alleging burials outside the ranch, searched the property March 9, and began asking for the roughly 200,000 unredacted files, which contain some 13,000 references to Zorro Ranch. Six documented attempts from February 13 through June, including a Touhy request submitted May 3 at DOJ's own direction. A June 9 letter to Blanche laid out the 2019 agreement and sought remedies including forfeiture of the ranch. The June 30 final demand, addressed to Blanche and Associate Deputy AG Diego Pestana and made public July 9, set July 31 as the line: produce or the request is denied and all legal remedies follow.

The department's answer, in full: a same-day response it calls timely and substantive (spokesperson Kiersten Pels; content never made public), followed on July 10 by a hand-delivered production of 31 pages consisting of already-released portal documents, redactions with no new content, and photocopies of local news coverage. Torrez: getting 31 pages including old newspaper clippings and letters from our own agency is pretty pathetic. On July 14, SDNY, under US Attorney Jay Clayton, himself a nominee for a permanent post, called to say it will not cooperate; after DOJ officials told the Senate under oath they would work with New Mexico, Clayton's office softened to seeking dialogue consistent with protective orders. Torrez's office answered that verbal assurances have been arriving since April and no records have followed. Both positions are carried here; the dispute itself is the record. The state's Survivor's Truth Commission runs in parallel, with subpoenas out to banks, US Attorneys' offices, and the offices of both Torrez and Governor Lujan Grisham, an interim report due July 31, and a final report due December 31 before the commission dissolves January 1, 2027.

On July 22, House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan sent Blanche a criminal referral against former special counsel Jack Smith, alleging false statements in Smith's December 17, 2025 deposition about access to members' text messages. Smith's counsel, Peter Koski and Lanny Breuer, call the referral meritless, noting it concedes Smith made no false statement and faults him for not volunteering unasked-for information. A DOJ spokesperson confirmed receipt: the department "will investigate all evidence of criminal conduct."

Sit with the geometry. Blanche was Trump's lead defense lawyer in both cases Smith brought. The referral asks Trump's defense lawyer to prosecute Trump's prosecutor. And Blanche signaled his appetite a week early: asked by Senator Hawley at the July 15 hearing whether he'd thought about investigating Smith for perjury, Blanche answered that testimony before the body is taken very seriously, yes.

The conflict was formally identified before any of it. In March 2025, within two weeks of Blanche's confirmation, DOJ's top ethics lawyer, Joseph Tirrell, briefed Blanche and Emil Bove with a printed presentation: recusal from Trump matters in his personal capacity was necessary. Blanche signed an ethics pledge barring participation in matters involving Blanche Law clients for a year and in any matter involving a personal or political relationship. He committed under oath at his DAG hearing to follow career ethics guidance. He disregarded it. Tirrell was fired by July 2025 and is suing the department. By May 2026 the department would say only that Blanche "is recused from many cases" while refusing to name one; CNN reported he had not recused from the Brennan investigation despite the directive, prompting Senator Schiff's inquiry. Columbia's Benjamin Grimes called the conflict insurmountable, because the only superior who can evaluate it is Trump. Asked at the hearing about independence, Blanche gave Senator Van Hollen the whole answer in one sentence: the fact that I used to be President Trump's lawyer is just a fact. Senator Kennedy asked whether he and Trump are friends, and Blanche's answer slipped tenses on its own: "I'm his lawyer, was his lawyer."

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was wrongly deported to El Salvador's CECOT prison in March 2025 despite a court order. The DOJ career lawyer who admitted the mistake was placed on leave by Blanche and removed. After courts forced Abrego Garcia's return, the department charged him with human smuggling in Tennessee over a 2022 traffic stop that had produced no charges at the time.

On May 22, 2026, US District Judge Waverly Crenshaw dismissed the indictment. The order names its cause: Blanche "started the investigation to implicate Abrego," rather than to identify who was responsible for the smuggling the stop suggested. Crenshaw found the objective evidence showed the government would not have prosecuted absent Abrego Garcia's successful lawsuit, that Blanche's public statements and the involvement of Associate Deputy AG Singh directly tie Main Justice to the reopened investigation, and that the government failed to rebut the presumption of vindictiveness, while finding insufficient evidence of actual vindictiveness. Precision matters here: this is a presumption finding the government could not rebut, not a verdict of proven intent, and DOJ is appealing. It is still the rarest kind of dismissal in federal practice, and the order names the acting attorney general of the United States as the source of the taint. The Campaign for Government Accountability filed a New York Bar complaint over his conduct in the case; DOJ calls it baseless.

Nineteen days into the acting role, Blanche announced an eleven-count indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center alongside FBI Director Patel, alleging concealed payments to informants inside extremist organizations. On May 5 the department conceded it had no information that SPLC leadership knew of the informant activities, a qualification that undercut the announcement's framing; the indictment was refiled June 4. James Comey was indicted a second time on April 28 in the Eastern District of North Carolina, charged under 18 U.S.C. § 871 and § 875(c) over the May 2025 Instagram post of a shell arrangement reading 86 47, after the first indictment, brought on charges career prosecutors declined, was dismissed in Virginia. The NYC Bar called the second indictment patently frivolous. Joseph diGenova, Trump's former personal attorney and a promoter of 2020 election conspiracy theories, was sworn in April 20 as counselor to the attorney general to lead the grand-conspiracy investigation of John Brennan, based in Fort Pierce. Civil Rights Division opened on Cassidy Hutchinson over her January 6 testimony following a referral from a Trump ally; the ActBlue investigation launched the week of the Bondi firing. And the posture was announced in advance: on November 7, 2025, Blanche told an audience of young lawyers the department was at war with rogue activist judges, a statement the NYC Bar condemned ten days later as an assault on judicial independence. The targets share one characteristic, and it is not a legal theory.

The recusal story only works because the machinery that would have enforced it no longer exists. Per the NYC Bar's opposition report: the ethics official who advised Blanche's recusal was terminated; the Office of Professional Responsibility was dismantled; the OPR director position has been vacant for more than a year. Schiff's inquiry documents the wider pattern: career ethics staff gutted, political appointees assigned final say over adverse personnel actions, bar referrals, recusals, waivers, and nominee financial disclosures.

With OPR gone, the only bodies left that can examine the conduct of the chief law enforcement officer are external: three state bars now holding referrals or complaints (New York via the Williams order, the June 22 former-judges grievance, and the CGA complaint; D.C. via Woodward; Florida via Brito), the federal judges sanctioning counsel in their own courtrooms, and the grievance committees. The June 22 complaint to the First Judicial Department makes the argument explicitly: the bar must maintain jurisdiction precisely because internal DOJ accountability no longer functions. Accountability for the acting attorney general of the United States has been outsourced, by demolition, to the New York bar.