U.S. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche speaks to the media as U.S. President Donald Trump listens in the Press Briefing Room at the White House in Washington D.C., June 27, 2025. REUTERS/Ken Cedeno
President Donald Trump has picked Todd Blanche as his permanent attorney general, according to a top political scientist, because ex-Attorney General Pam Bondi was not corrupt enough for him.
“What everyone needs to understand is the danger here and what the Senate is concerned about. Todd Blanche — he's not a new bestie, he's a true bestie,” Morgan State University political scientist Dr. Jason Johnson told MS NOW’s Nicolle Wallace on Thursday. “He was Trump's lawyer. His entire reason for being in this job is to protect this president, because he agrees with him ideologically, because he sees a kindred spirit with him morally, and because he sees his job as not serving the country but serving Trump.”
He elaborated on how Blanche was accused by Bondi of playing a key role in covering up Trump’s relationship with convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. He also mentioned that Blanche had a two-day sit-down meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, seemingly for the purpose of finding out how she could protect the president.
“I wish that would be enough to keep him from being confirmed, but it may not be,” Johnson told Wallace. “It may be his position on the slush fund and January 6th that keeps this man from being in the position of the most important attorney in the United States of America.”
Regarding the slush fund, Johnson referred to Blanche’s well-documented role in settling a lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS for $10 billion. Trump sued his own agency because, during his first term, an independent contractor affiliated with them leaked his tax returns, proving that he had filed far less than most Americans in most years and had a number of undisclosed business failures. Because Trump controls both the IRS and the Department of Justice, which in theory would defend the IRS from litigation, critics claimed there was a conflict of interest and that any settlement would involve self-dealing.
When the presiding judge, concerned about those accusations, ordered all parties involved to appear before her bench, Blanche rushed through a settlement for $1.8 billion that would go to Trump-affiliated institutions and Trump supporters who claimed to have been victims of government weaponization.
“What do you think of the sort of one-sided politics here?” Wallace asked Johnson about the lack of Republican outrage over Blanche’s actions in terms of potential conflicts of interest. “Republicans made hay when Obama's attorney general Loretta Lynch had what appeared to be a spontaneous run-in with Bill Clinton ... And here, of course, the levels of this — the personal lawyer being the attorney general — it melts it all down as a farce.”
Johnson agreed with Wallace.
“This was Trump's personal attorney,” Johnson said. “He's doing podcasts with Sean Hannity. He's trying to create a slush fund for the president of the United States. He said, ‘Hey, we should send ICE agents to polls.’ He says that his job is to serve this president as opposed to the people. So there is no comparison. I think that's so important for people to understand — not anyone that Barack Obama had. We have never had an attorney, and possibly a full attorney general, who has made it so nakedly obvious that his goal was to be the personal lawyer of the president, as opposed to even serving the [Department of Justice].”
Earlier this month, reporter Asawin Suebsaeng's Zeteo newsletter revealed that Trump agreed to appoint Blanche because he hopes Blanche will succeed in prosecuting Trump’s perceived political enemies.
"Trump and his White House are coaxing with a very simple message: the boss will be monumentally livid at you if you don’t get very serious – very soon – about jailing his political enemies," Suebsaeng reported. He later added that an adviser told Zeteo that Trump’s instructions to Blanche were, “You cannot f—— up like Pam."
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