Will Trump’s former defense lawyer protect the Justice Department from Trump?

WASHINGTON — When Matt Gaetz abruptly withdrew as President-elect Donald Trump’s candidate for attorney general on Thursday, many career attorneys in the Justice Department breathed a sigh of relief.

Hours later, though, Trump nominated former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a longtime loyalist who backed the former president’s lies about the 2020 election and said “horrible” people in the department were trying to make names for themselves by “going after Donald Trump and weaponizing our legal system.”

Justice Department attorneys now hope that Trump’s pick for the critical No. 2 position at the department — Todd Blanche, the president-elect’s defense lawyer — can help protect the department’s career civil servants from Trump’s wrath.

People close to Blanche say his past work as a career federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York gives him an understanding of the department’s tradition of barring presidents and politicians from influencing individual criminal investigations. 

Some current DOJ officials hope that Blanche, who as deputy attorney general will oversee day-to-day operations in the department if confirmed, can help prevent a worst-case scenario: Trump wielding federal law enforcement as a cudgel against his political enemies.

“He’s more the kind of guy I would have expected. Intelligent, former federal prosecutor, experience working as an attorney, no statutory rape,” said a source inside the Justice Department, referring to the allegation that Gaetz paid a 17-year-old for sex, which the former congressman has denied. “You know, small things like that.”

Close relationship with Trump

Blanche served as Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer in the Stormy Daniels hush money case brought by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg. Trump was ultimately convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records and became the first former president to be convicted of a crime.

Blanche, who until recently was a registered Democrat, left the law firm of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft in early 2023 to represent Trump in the case. Trump’s sentencing has been repeatedly delayed and may never happen now that he’s the president-elect.

Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the Trump-Vance transition team, praised Blanche and said that Trump was re-elected by the American people to “change the status quo in Washington.”

“That’s why he has chosen brilliant and highly-respected leaders, like well-respected attorney and prosecutor Todd Blanche to serve in his Administration,” she said in a statement.

She did not respond to questions from NBC News about whether the administration would maintain the long-standing policy of limiting White House contacts with DOJ officials and whether Blanche would follow the ethics recommendations of career DOJ officials.

Some current and former DOJ officials say Blanche’s close relationship and record of legal work with Trump has raised concerns. They are concerned that Blanche won’t stand up to Trump, who throughout his first term repeatedly flouted post-Watergate restrictions on contacts between the Justice Department and the White House that are in place to stop presidents from using federal law enforcement to target their political enemies.

“He’s the president’s personal criminal defense attorney. That’s what his job will be,” said one law enforcement official. “He’s there to protect the president, not the American people.”

Other Justice Department employees were cautiously optimistic that Blanche — whom one referred to as “the closest thing to ‘Team Normal’ that we’ll see” — would at least prevent some of the scenarios they’ve been conjuring since Trump won the 2024 presidential race and nominated Gaetz.

One Justice Department official said people are feeling better about Blanche because he’s a legitimate lawyer and a former Justice Department official, but “that reflects the low expectations.”

Mimi Rocah, the district attorney for Westchester County, New York, said on MSNBC last week that she’d worked with Blanche as a federal prosecutor in New York and that Blanche knows what the Justice Department is supposed to be and how it is meant to function.

“He believes in the vision of the Department of Justice to do the right thing, in the right way, for the right reasons,” Rocah said. “And I do hope and believe that he knows that, and that he will continue that once he rises to the occasion in that role.”

A former colleague described Blanche as a smart and thorough attorney well-versed in the intricacies of the Justice Department, and the independent role it is meant to play. That person anticipated that Blanche would be a moderate relative to Gaetz, and despite his rapport with Trump would be unlikely to carry out an illegal order.

Michael Bromwich, who previously served as the Justice Department’s inspector general, said Blanche would be taking on “one of the hardest jobs in government” with “enormous” management challenges, and that his position as the president’s criminal defense attorney would complicate matters.

“Needless to say, we’ve never faced this circumstance before,” Bromwich said. “I think it’s ethically problematic for Blanche. I think one of the reasons Trump selected him is that he’s comfortable with Blanche, he communicates with him, and that they have a relationship in which Blanche does what Trump wants him to do.”

“I think it’s going to be an extraordinarily challenging job for Blanche,” Bromwich added. “I think the ethos and the culture that he was brought up in in the U.S. attorney’s office is the antithesis of how Trump uses the criminal justice system, which is that it should do what he wants, rewards his friends and punishes his enemies.”

How Trump’s first deputy attorney general fared

When Trump first took office in 2017, he didn’t know his deputy attorney general well, and their relationship immediately became vital and volatile.

Rod Rosenstein, a career federal prosecutor with a reputation for being nonpartisan, chose FBI Director Robert Mueller to serve as a special counsel after Trump fired FBI Director James Comey and Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the bureau’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The decision infuriated Trump, who berated Sessions and Rosenstein for it. For the next two years, though, Rosenstein defended Mueller and protected his team as it completed its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Mueller found that Trump and his team welcomed help from Moscow during the 2016 election but did not find enough evidence to prosecute them for coordinating with Russia. Mueller reached no conclusion about whether Trump had obstructed justice. Rosenstein resigned from the DOJ in 2019.

Rosenstein told NBC News this week that Blanche would face challenges. He said Trump was “very hands on” and called him directly during his time in the DOJ’s No. 2 position.

“President Trump often called the deputy attorney general, that is me, when he wanted something done, and sometimes we were able to do it, and sometimes we weren’t,” Rosenstein recalled.

“There’s nothing wrong with that kind of relationship. I think the president obviously seems to want to put into senior jobs people who have been unfailingly loyal to him,” Rosenstein added. “It’s legal to do that. The risk is, if you prioritize loyalty over competence, you might not get accomplished what you wanted to accomplish.”

But Rosenstein said the deputy attorney general has a duty to prevent the president or White House officials from trying to improperly influence criminal investigations. He said the department’s No. 2 official must “make sure things are implemented in a nonpartisan way” in all criminal investigations. He added: “Sometimes that requires saying ‘no’ if the president or somebody in the White House wants to pursue a particular case that the department concludes is not appropriate to pursue.”

“It’s not hypothetical, right? It’s real under Trump,” Rosenstein said.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority in July gave the president “absolute immunity” when it comes to his interactions with the attorney general, including ordering criminal investigations of specific individuals. But that immunity does not extend to the attorney general, deputy attorney general or other DOJ prosecutors.

“For the president to call for the prosecution of particular individuals is unusual, but it’s not illegal,” Rosenstein said. “However, it would be illegal for department officials to implement that kind of a request, and so you need to make sure to serve your appropriate role as an official of the Justice Department.”

Rosenstein added, “There are some things that the president may want that you can’t do. You just have to tell him ‘no.’”

Rosenstein said the deputy attorney general also needs to have the management experience and temperament to get things done.

“It requires you to know how to manage the institution, not from a partisan perspective, right? You don’t come in and say, ‘Hey, we need to fire all the Democrats and hire all Republicans.’” Rosenstein said. “You need people who actually know how to litigate, know how to put together and try cases. You can’t send a politician into court to try to win a case. You need a lawyer. And so they need to make sure they have people who know how to get that job done.”

Blanche must also be able to withstand intense public scrutiny. Rosenstein said the media environment is far different than it was when he joined the DOJ in 1990, when career officials — or even a deputy attorney general — had “very little chance of getting any national attention.”

Blanche could also be targeted on social media by the president himself if he stands up to him behind the scenes, as Trump has done to his own Justice Department appointees before.

Bromwich, the former DOJ inspector general, predicted that Blanche, given Trump’s track record during his first term, is on a mission impossible.

“I think it will be enormously difficult for Blanche to balance the orders he gets from the president with what he knows is the right thing to do,” Bromwich said. “If I were he, I would have stayed as far away from the Justice Department as I could. I don’t think it will end well for him.”