President Donald Trump has repeatedly failed in the goals he has set for his Justice Department. He has been unable to prosecute political enemies like New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey or individuals he wrongly blamed for his Reflecting Pool fiasco like Olympic canoeist David Hearn. He’s also lost more than 20 of the cases he sent to force states to send him voter information.
Now, as attorney and CNN legal analyst Elie Honig recently explained, Trump’s handling of Justice Department matters has created two massive crises that severely undermine the agency’s credibility with judges.
“Ordinarily, the first order of business would be restoring DOJ's political independence and restoring DOJ's credibility in the courts, but it doesn't seem that Blanche is super interested in either of those,” Honig told CNN anchor Brianna Keilar on Monday when discussing Trump’s newly-confirmed attorney general, his former personal lawyer Todd Blanche. “Those are the two biggest issues facing the department right now — the fact that they have undertaken and are still in the midst of several prosecutions aimed at people, in large part or entirely, because they are political enemies of the president.”
He added, “That's something we've never seen before. I don't expect Blanche to change that, because he's been one of the drivers of it.” Honig then identified a separate issue impacting Trump’s Justice Department insofar as its credibility is concerned.
“The other big issue, Brianna, is that DOJ has a credibility crisis right now in the courts. We have seen federal judges across this country say, essentially, ‘I can no longer trust DOJ, take what they tell me as a given, as I have for the past several decades, because DOJ has made several false representations in court,’” Honig told Keilar. “So those, to me, are the two biggest crises facing the department right now, but Blanche has really been more a contributor to those problems than a solution. We'll see if that changes when he gets the official title, but his history does not suggest he will.”
Ultimately, Honig warned Keilar that Blanche views the job of attorney general as being that of Trump’s personal advocate rather than that of impartially upholding the law.
“Blanche sees the Attorney General job differently than I think any of his immediate predecessors,” Honig explained. “There's a moment that sticks in my mind where Blanche is being interviewed — I think it's by CBS News — and the reporter asks Todd Blanche, ‘Will you be independent of the President?’ And Blanche reaches into his jacket pocket, takes out a mini Constitution, and he says to the reporter, essentially, ‘Show me here where it says that the attorney general is on an island. Show me here where it says that the attorney general is separate from the executive branch.’”
He concluded, “So I think, given what we've seen so far — and Blanche has had a year and a half in high office within the Justice Department — I think his legacy will be that he moved the attorney general off of that island and much closer to the White House.” Because Trump is determined to make sure Republicans retain control of Congress during the 2026 midterms by using the Justice Department to falsely accuse states of voting theft, it’s entirely possible Blanche will comply if “the President turns to DOJ and says, ‘Hey, I want you to find fraud and say there's fraud in '26.’”