From Trump’s Attorney to Attorney General: The Rise of Todd Blanche

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Michael Barbaro** (0:29)
From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.
To be confirmed as the next Attorney General, Todd Blanche must convince members of the US. Senate that despite how political the Department of Justice has now become, it would be even worse without him at the top. Today, as his confirmation hearings begin, my colleague, Glenn Thrush, recounts the unlikely story of how Blanche became Trump's legal enforcer. It's Wednesday, July 15th. Hey, Glenn.

**Glenn Thrush** (1:24)
Hello.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:25)
Good morning to you, sir.

**Glenn Thrush** (1:27)
Good morning to you, sir.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:28)
Is there an echo in here?

**Glenn Thrush** (1:30)
Is there an echo in here?

**Michael Barbaro** (1:34)
All right, well, on to business. Glenn, in a few hours, Wednesday morning, the Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to begin confirmation hearings for President Trump's next pick to be his Attorney General, Todd Blanche, and increasingly, it looks like this hearing is going to be pretty complicated and the outcome genuinely uncertain?

**Glenn Thrush** (2:03)
We're at a pretty precarious moment for the Department of Justice and for Todd Blanche.
Over the past six weeks, really, at President Trump's prompting, Blanche oversaw the creation of this incredibly controversial and highly unusual $1.8 billion fund to compensate purported victims of Biden and Obama era justice department overreach, the J6 defendants and people who were subject to other investigations. And in late May, the Senate Republicans just had it. They called in Blanche and for about an hour, grilled him, lambasted him, told him it was totally unacceptable. So the dynamic here is the Republicans in the Senate have been incredibly skeptical of recent moves that Blanche has made in coordination with Trump. Now Blanche has spent the better part of a month trying to clean that stuff up, but there are still several members in the Senate and a couple of members on the Senate Judiciary Committee who really have serious tough questions for him. And this is really a first for someone who is facing cabinet scrutiny.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:14)
What do you mean a first?

**Glenn Thrush** (3:16)
We're just in a totally different environment than the first wave of Trump cabinet nominees. They all basically got a pass. There was some tough questioning, but that was a period of time early on when Republicans were just inclined to line up and give the president as much authority as possible. We're long past that, and the gravitational pull of the midterm elections is forcing a lot of these Republicans who had been in line to start raising some serious questions.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:43)
So there's a lot of skepticism from increasingly independent minded, agitated, midterm, fearful Republican senators of Todd Blanche.
Let's talk about how Blanche became Trump's pick for Attorney General, how he got onto Trump's radar and became the person he hopes will define the remaining years of the second term when it comes to the Department of Justice. Tell us the Blanche story.

**Glenn Thrush** (4:17)
So this is what's perhaps most interesting. There are not a lot of data points in his biography that would have indicated he would have gone down this path.
Blanche, from the interviews I've done over the past year and a half, was a pretty vanilla federal prosecutor from the Southern District of New York. It's been described as the Yankee Stadium of Federal Prosecutors' Offices. It's where Rudy Giuliani sort of gained his fame. Blanche rises through the ranks of that office, and like a lot of these guys, got to midlife and decided he wanted to cash in. Right. So he jumps to a big time, white shoe law firm in 2017 in New York. At some point in time, Boris Epstein, Donald Trump's longtime legal advisor, connects with Blanche and enlists him to the criminal defense team representing Paul Manafort, Trump's first campaign chairman. And that really throws Blanche into this rotation of Trump criminal defense lawyers.
And what's fascinating is in the period after Trump loses in 2020, Blanche had a decision to make at this point in time. He could have cut bait from Trump. It really looked like Trump was a losing cause. But instead, what he did was he insisted on representing Trump at this low ebb moment over the objections of the leadership of his law firm. And actually broke from his firm, started his own firm, and threw in his lot with Trump. And like so many of these entrepreneurial characters in Trump's second term, that decision is what really bonded him to Trump. He took a big risk on Trump. And that, to the president, is really the ultimate bond.