Newly-revealed messages show attorney general’s key role in Trump vendettas

U.S. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 23, 2026. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon

This Wednesday, July 15 and Thursday, July 16, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding confirmation hearings for Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche — who President Donald Trump has nominated to take over the position permanently. Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pennsylvania), a key swing vote, is saying that he's a firm "no" on Blanche, but his confirmation is possible if Senate Republicans stick together. Blanche, during the hearings, will face some tough questions about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. And according to the New York Times, another vulnerability is Blanche's willingness to help Trump use the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) against the president's political foes.

Newly discovered e-mails, journalist Glenn Thrush reports in the Times, show that Blanche not only went along with Trump's push to use DOJ against his enemies — he encouraged it.

"The multifaceted portrait of Mr. Blanche that emerges from 352 pages of documents obtained by American Oversight is of a Trump loyalist who is committed to executing the president's agenda but also intent on keeping a firm…. grip on processes inside his building, perhaps because he has such limited control over forces beyond it," Thrush explains. "Mr. Blanche's cooperation in Mr. Trump's retribution campaign, both as deputy attorney general and acting attorney general since the ouster in April of his predecessor, Pam Bondi, is his defining characteristic, in the view of critics. It will be a flashpoint in Mr. Blanche's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee."

American Oversight, according to Thrush, obtained the documents via Freedom of Information Act requests.

American Oversight Executive Director Chioma Chukwu told the Times, "Todd Blanche oversaw senior Justice Department officials pursuing politically charged investigations, convened recurring meetings of the so-called weaponization working group, and committed departmental resources to advancing President Trump's efforts targeting political opponents, election administration and other high-profile vendettas. Senators should judge him not by his assurances at a confirmation hearing, but by the record he has already built."

According to Thrush, the "newly disclosed e-mails" obtained by American Oversight "cover a relatively narrow, but nonetheless crucial, patch of a battleground in Mr. Blanche's tenure at the Department (of Justice): how to enact Mr. Trump's Day 1 executive order to 'correct past misconduct by the federal government related to the weaponization of law enforcement and the weaponization of the intelligence community.'"

"During the first half of 2025," Thrush reports, "it appeared as if the department's weaponization group would be a major, perhaps central, part of Mr. Trump's drive to punish those who once held the power to hold him to account. That is the less the case now. Much of the action has migrated to U.S. attorney's offices, including in Miami, where prosecutors have been grinding away in an effort to build what Trump loyalists describe as 'grand conspiracy' by the Biden and Obama administrations, despite a paucity of evidence."

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