Trump rewards legal defense team, picks lawyer Todd Blanche as No. 2 Justice official

WASHINGTON (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Todd Blanche, an attorney who led the legal team that defended the Republican at his hush money criminal trial, to serve as the second-highest ranking Justice Department official.

A former federal prosecutor, Blanche has been a key figure on Trump’s defense team both in the New York case that ended in a conviction in May, and the federal cases brought by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.

“Todd is an excellent attorney who will be a crucial leader in the Justice Department, fixing what has been a broken System of Justice for far too long,” Trump said in a statement Thursday announcing his pick.

If confirmed as deputy attorney general by the Republican-led Senate, Blanche would manage the day-to-day operations of the sprawling Justice Department, which Trump has vowed to radically overhaul.

The announcement comes a day after the president-elect said he had chosen as attorney general Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a Trump loyalist who once faced a Justice Department sex trafficking investigation that ended in no charges.

Trump is appointing two other members of his defense team to high-ranking Justice Department positions.

Emil Bove, an ex-federal prosecutor, will be the principal associate deputy attorney general and will serve as acting deputy attorney general until Blanche is confirmed, Trump said.

Trump tabbed D. John Sauer, who successfully argued his presidential immunity case before the U.S. Supreme Court, to be the solicitor general, representing his administration before the high court. Sauer, who was previously Missouri’s solicitor general, was a Rhodes scholar and served as a Supreme Court clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia.

Blanche represented Trump in both the 2020 election interference case in Washington and the Florida case accusing the former president of hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate. In both cases, the defense team successfully mounted a legal strategy focused heavily on delaying the cases until after the election.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon last summer threw out the classified documents case, finding that Smith’s appointment by Attorney General Merrick Garland was illegal. The 2020 election case was stalled amid wrangling over Trump’s claims of immunity from prosecution that went up to the Supreme Court.

The Justice Department is now evaluating how to wind down the two prosecutions to comply with longstanding department policy that says sitting presidents cannot be indicted or prosecuted while in office.

Blanche has also represented Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, and succeeded in getting a mortgage fraud case against him dismissed in the same New York court where Trump was convicted. Blanche argued that case, brought by the Manhattan district attorney’s office, was too similar to one that landed Manafort in federal prison and therefore amounted to double jeopardy.

Blanche joined Trump’s defense team just prior to his April 2023 arraignment in the New York case. Trump was accused in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex. Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts, though his attorneys are urging the judge to overturn the guilty verdict.

Blanche left the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, where he was a partner in the White Collar Defense and Investigations practice, to form his own practice. Blanche told colleagues at Cadwalader that he was resigning to represent Trump. He’d joined the firm in September 2017.

In an email announcing his departure, he wrote: “I have been asked to represent Trump in the recently charged DA case, and after much thought/consideration, I have decided it is the best thing for me to do and an opportunity I should not pass up.”

Originally from the Denver suburbs, Blanche graduated from American University in Washington, D.C., and Brooklyn Law School.

Blanche first joined the Justice Department as a paralegal in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, while in law school.

He was later a law clerk for federal judges and then a prosecutor in the same U.S. attorney’s office, which covers Manhattan, the Bronx, and northern suburbs, for about eight years and spent two years as co-chief of the office’s violent crimes unit.

Bove, a star lacrosse player in college, joined Blanche’s law firm last year and handled many key arguments in Trump’s legal cases, including pending efforts to get the hush money conviction thrown out in light of his election victory. As a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, Bove was involved in multiple high-profile prosecutions, including a drug-trafficking case against the former Honduran president’s brother, a man who set off a pressure cooker device in Manhattan and a man who sent dozens of mail bombs to prominent targets across the country.

___

Sisak reported from New York.