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.
But Trump didn’t stop there. When Siebert’s office made clear that there simply wasn’t enough evidence to justify such indictments, Trump forced the prosecutor — whom the president had nominated just four months earlier — out of his job, taking the scandal to a new level. Condemning the former police officer who’d worked his way up through the ranks at the office over the past 15 years, Trump said that he considered the respected prosecutor “a Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job,” despite the fact he was a Trump nominee. After the president declared, “I want him out,” Siebert stepped down. Trump soon after wrote online, “He didn’t quit, I fired him!” MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian explained soon after, “[T]he United States is confronting something we have never seen before: A president essentially ordering his DoJ to charge someone with a crime, regardless of whether the people whose job it is to evaluate the case think there is insufficient evidence.” Put another way, some presidents get rid of officials for being corrupt; this president forced out Siebert for not being corrupt. Three months later, the Trump-appointed deputy AG appeared on “Meet the Press,” pretended the president has nothing to do with the Justice Department’s prosecutorial decisions, and despite extensive evidence, including Trump’s own public comments, told a national television audience that an ousted prosecutor wasn’t actually fired, even though anyone who remembers the events that unfolded in September knows better. Blanche began Sunday with dwindling credibility. He ended the day with none. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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