President Trump announced Wednesday evening that he plans to nominate Todd Blanche, his onetime personal lawyer, to serve as attorney general.
Blanche has been the acting head of the Justice Department since April 2, when Trump elevated him from his deputy attorney general post after firing Pam Bondi.
White House deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino shared a video on X of Trump making the announcement during a private dinner in the Rose Garden.
“Tomorrow I’m instructing Dan and everybody else that’s involved in that very complicated process, which is gonna go I think very quickly, that we are going to make [Blanche] permanent attorney general,” Trump said.
Blanche could have served in an acting capacity for 210 days after being named acting AG, giving Trump until late October to decide his future in the Justice Department.
The 51-year-old Colorado native will need to be confirmed by the Senate, where Republicans hold a 53-47 majority, to formally replace Bondi as AG
In an interview with “Pod Force One” Tuesday, Trump appeared satisfied with Blanche’s performance as acting AG, during which he’s overseen a sweeping crackdown on federal benefit fraud and signed off on the creation of a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that he has since said the department will not move forward with following bipartisian backlash.
“I wanted to see how he’s received … and he’s done a very good job,” Trump told Post columnist Miranda Devine of Blanche.
In his first weeks as acting AG, Blanche secured the indictment of former FBI Director James Comey on charges of threatening to kill the president. Critics claimed the indictment was based on a politically charged reading of an innocuous Instagram photo of shells arranged on a beach to read “86 47”.
“Rest assured that the career assistant United States attorneys in North Carolina, the career FBI agents, the career Secret Service agents that investigated this case didn’t just look at the Instagram post and walk away,” Blanche told NBC’s “Meet The Press” on May 3.
“I am not permitted to get into the details of what the grand jury heard or found, as you know,” he added. “But rest assured that it’s not just the Instagram post that leads somebody to get indicted.”
Blanche separately appointed Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old former DC US attorney from the Reagan administration, to oversee a Florida-based investigation into whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired over the last decade to undermine Trump.
A former partner at New York’s venerable Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, Blance repped the once and future president in a Manhattan criminal case in which Trump was convicted of 34 counts of altering business records to conceal hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election.
Blanche also helmed Trump’s defense in federal cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith accusing the president of unlawfully hoarding national security information at his Mar-a-Lago resort, as well as conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Those cases were shelved after Trump’s victory over Kamala Harris in the 2024 race for the White House.
With Post wires
