Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has spent the year struggling with a lack of credibility. In fact, it’s been lost on no one that he probably shouldn’t even have his leadership post at the Justice Department, given that the Republican lawyer’s only relevant experience is having served as one of Donald Trump’s criminal defense attorneys.
What’s more, as 2025 progressed, Blanche didn’t exactly cover himself in glory, as his handling of the Eric Adams and Ghislaine Maxwell cases helped demonstrate.
But as Main Justice faces new accusations of a systemic cover-up of the Jeffrey Epstein files, the deputy AG has spent recent days trying to use his position to tamp down an intensifying controversy, which would be an easier task if Blanche were a more believable figure.
On Sunday, for example, the president’s former lawyer struggled with questions about the Justice Department removing photos from its online collection of newly released Epstein documents, including one showing Trump with unidentified women. Blanche’s answers about moving Maxwell, a convicted sex offender, to a minimum-security prison weren’t much better.
But one exchange stood out for me. The New York Times reported:
Kristen Welker, the moderator on ‘Meet the Press,’ raised the criminal cases filed against the former F.B.I. director James Comey and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James — charges that were dismissed last month when a judge found that the prosecutor who brought them had been unlawfully put in that job by the Trump administration.
That appointment was made, and those criminal charges were filed, after Mr. Trump forced out his own prosecutor in Virginia, Erik S. Siebert, who had concluded that the evidence did not support charges against either Mr. Comey or Ms. James.
Asked whether the Justice Department was taking directions about whom to prosecute from the president, Blanche was incredulous. “No, of course we’re not,” he said.
The deputy attorney general quickly added, as part of an apparent effort to set the record straight, “Mr. Siebert wasn’t fired because he refused to bring cases. He resigned.”
There’s overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
NBC News reported over the summer, for example, that the White House was leaning heavily on Siebert, the then-U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, for brazenly corrupt reasons: Team Trump wanted him to go after Comey and James, not because they’d done anything wrong, but because the president saw them as political foes.
This, in and of itself, was indefensible. It’s an obvious and outrageous abuse for a White House to push federal prosecutors to bring baseless charges at the president’s direction as part of a retaliatory scheme.









