Donald Trump’s picks to fill top Justice Department positions are attorneys whose most notable recent experience is fighting to keep him out of prison. In an epic turn, they’d go from criminally defending him and fighting for his immunity from prosecution to helping lead the nation’s law enforcement apparatus and representing his administration at the Supreme Court.
Trump wants Todd Blanche as his deputy attorney general — the second-ranking DOJ official — and Emil Bove as principal associate deputy attorney general. Trump said he wants his attorney general to be Matt Gaetz, whose main DOJ experience is having been investigated by the department for sex trafficking in a probe that ended last year without charges. (He has denied any wrongdoing.) Whether or not Gaetz — who resigned from Congress this week — becomes the country’s next top cop, the president-elect’s announcement of Blanche and Bove shows he’s seeking to stack the department with true loyalists.
Unlike Gaetz, both Blanche and Bove have DOJ experience as former prosecutors. They also gained criminal defense experience over the past year defending Trump in multiple cases, including in the Manhattan state court trial that ended with guilty verdicts against their client. Announcing the picks, Trump said Bove would serve as acting deputy attorney general pending Blanche’s Senate confirmation.
While Trump’s two federal cases are apparently winding down because of his election, the New York state case they lost at trial is still awaiting sentencing. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office has until Tuesday to update the trial court with its position about how it wants to proceed in light of Trump’s impending White House return. Trump has separate counsel in his fourth criminal case (in Georgia state court), Steve Sadow, who said in congratulating his fellow defense lawyers’ political promotions that he’s “never been a prosecutor and never will be.” Presidents can’t pardon state cases or get them dismissed.
Trump’s choice for solicitor general — another high-ranking DOJ spot and the federal government’s Supreme Court counsel — is John Sauer. He argued the appeal in the case where the Republican-appointed high court majority granted Trump broad criminal immunity. Sauer’s other Supreme Court argument, in 2018, was also a contentious appeal, a death penalty case when he was Missouri’s solicitor general. Like in the immunity case, the court sided with Sauer’s client (the state) in a divided ruling featuring Republican appointees in the majority. His Missouri experience also consisted of unsuccessfully challenging 2020 election results in key states. If confirmed as solicitor general, Sauer will appear regularly before a broadly like-minded majority of justices to defend Trump administration priorities. Unlike some of Trump’s non-DOJ picks, aside from Gaetz, Sauer has some more traditional qualifications. In addition to working as Missouri’s solicitor general, as a prosecutor, and in private practice, he clerked for two well-regarded judges in GOP circles — on the Supreme Court for the late Antonin Scalia, and on the federal appeals court for J. Michael Luttig, the latter being better known today for speaking out against Trump. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in Donald Trump’s legal cases.
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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