WASHINGTON – US President Donald Trump announced that he planned to soon make Todd Blanche “permanent Attorney-General” months after he assumed that post in an acting capacity, according to a video posted by a White House aide on the night of June 3.
Blanche, a former personal lawyer to Trump, has been leading the Justice Department since the president dismissed Attorney-General Pam Bondi in early April.
Before that, he had been Bondi’s chief deputy.
The video, posted by Dan Scavino, an assistant to the president, showed Trump making the announcement during a Rose Garden event.
CNN and Politico reported earlier that Trump intended to nominate Blanche as the nation’s top US law enforcement officer.
That nomination must be approved by the Senate, where Trump’s fellow Republicans hold a very thin majority that they must defend in midterm elections this November.
Blanche, who has shown enthusiasm for carrying out Trump’s agenda and defended prosecutions of some of the president’s opponents, will face intense scrutiny from Democrats and perhaps some Republicans over the turmoil at the department since Trump returned to office in January 2025.
Thousands of federal prosecutors and FBI agents have been fired or resigned.
Blanche told reporters in April that he hadn’t been pressured to carry out retribution against Trump’s political enemies.
At his confirmation hearing, he will almost certainly be asked about his role in the department’s release of files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, as well as Trump’s recent attempt to establish a US$1.8 billion (S$2.31 billion) fund to pay victims of alleged government “weaponisation.”
At a congressional hearing on June 2, Blanche said the administration would not move forward with the fund, which had been a key pillar of the agreement Trump reached in May with the Internal Revenue Service and Treasury Department over leaks of his tax information during his first term.
Blanche, according to his LinkedIn profile, graduated from Brooklyn Law School and later supervised prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. BLOOMBERG
