Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters Tuesday that President Donald Trump has both a "right" and a "duty" to influence federal investigations, including those involving his political opponents, and that he does not view the president's involvement as improper pressure on the Justice Department.
The remarks came at a press conference days after Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi and installed Blanche, his former defense lawyer, as the nation's top law enforcement official. Blanche represented Trump in three of the four criminal cases the president faced while out of office.
Blanche did not shy away from the question of whether the DOJ is now acting on the president's wishes. He leaned into it. As Fox News reported, Blanche stated plainly:
"We have thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now. It is true that some of them involve men, women and entities that the president in the past has had issues with and believes should be investigated. That is his right and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning to lead this country, and so I do not view this as pressure."
That framing, the president directing investigative priorities as a feature of executive leadership, not a bug, will enrage the same Washington establishment that spent years insisting on a wall between the Oval Office and federal prosecutors. But Blanche's argument rests on a straightforward constitutional point: the president runs the executive branch, and the Justice Department sits inside it.
Blanche went further, turning the question of political interference back on the previous administration. He argued that the Biden-era DOJ itself crossed the line first, and that Trump's approach is a corrective, not an escalation.
Blanche told reporters:
"You had a president who, along with this department, had assistance, so this department helped two other local DA's go after the president. You had this department who stood idly by while states tried to keep President Trump off the ballot."
He dismissed the notion that the current DOJ has been improperly targeting Trump's opponents, calling such characterizations "completely false." But the department's recent track record tells its own story. The DOJ has opened several investigations into figures and entities on the other side of the political ledger, including U.S. officials who found that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election, Democratic lawmakers who encouraged service members to ignore unlawful orders, former President Joe Biden's alleged use of an autopen to sign official documents without his direct authorization, and liberal donors and fundraising groups.
For millions of Americans who watched the previous administration prosecute a former president and leading presidential candidate on novel legal theories, Blanche's framing will land as simple fairness. The failures that cost Pam Bondi her job left the department in flux, and Blanche inherits an institution that both sides now accuse of operating with a political thumb on the scale.
Trump fired Bondi last Thursday and named Blanche acting attorney general last week. The president has not signaled a nominee for the permanent role. Under federal rules, officials can serve in an acting capacity for up to 210 days, giving Blanche a long runway if Trump decides to wait.
The shakeup at DOJ headquarters has rippled across the administration. Trump's decision to reset the Justice Department before midterms signals that accountability at the top of the federal law enforcement apparatus is not optional, even for allies.
Trump has also reportedly held discussions with Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin about taking the attorney general job, though no formal nomination has materialized. The possibility of Zeldin, a former congressman from New York, moving to DOJ would itself create a second high-profile vacancy in the Cabinet.
When pressed on whether he wants the permanent appointment, Blanche offered a careful non-answer wrapped in loyalty. He said he did not ask for the acting role and framed every possible outcome as an honor.
"As to whether or not I want this job, I did not ask for this job. I love working for President Trump. It's the greatest honor of a lifetime, and if President Trump chooses to keep me as acting, that's an honor. If he chooses to nominate me, that's an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, 'Thank you very much. I love you, sir.'"
The remark drew attention for its personal tone. But its substance matters more than its style. Blanche signaled total deference to the president's decision, a posture that his critics will call servile and his allies will call exactly what the Justice Department has lacked for years: an attorney general who remembers who the boss is.
The broader fallout from Bondi's departure continues to generate questions inside the administration. Other Cabinet members now face scrutiny over conduct and messaging, and the DOJ vacancy sits at the center of the storm.
The acting attorney general steps into a department that has become the most politically contested institution in Washington. Under Biden, the DOJ pursued Trump through multiple criminal indictments. Under Trump, the DOJ has opened investigations into the officials and political actors who drove those earlier prosecutions. Neither side pretends the department operates in a vacuum.
Blanche's argument Tuesday was that the pretense should end. If the president believes certain people and entities deserve investigation, Blanche said, that belief is an exercise of executive authority, not a corruption of it. He pointed to what he described as the Biden DOJ's own willingness to assist local prosecutors targeting Trump and its failure to act when states moved to remove Trump from the ballot.
The DOJ has also made waves with politically charged moves in other cases. The department's move to dismiss Steve Bannon's contempt conviction from the January 6 investigation drew sharp reactions from both parties and underscored the degree to which the new DOJ leadership is willing to revisit the prior administration's prosecutorial choices.
Meanwhile, the controversies that trailed Bondi throughout her tenure, including the Epstein files saga, have not disappeared with her departure. They form part of the institutional backdrop that Blanche now navigates.
Open questions remain. Which specific investigations has the DOJ opened, and on what evidentiary basis? Will Trump nominate Blanche, Zeldin, or someone else entirely? And can any attorney general, acting or confirmed, restore public confidence in a department that has spent the better part of a decade at the center of partisan warfare?
Blanche's Tuesday remarks did not answer those questions. But they did establish his operating framework in plain language: the president sets the direction, the attorney general executes it, and the old norm of pretending otherwise is over.
For four years, Americans watched the Justice Department treat the sitting president's chief political rival as a criminal defendant. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, the same people who cheered those prosecutions want the wall between the White House and DOJ rebuilt overnight. Funny how that works.
