President Donald Trump's second-in-command at the Justice Department, Todd Blanche, is facing a rising wave of anger from pro-Trump influencers, who believe he is to blame for the scuttling of a plot to spring a martyred election conspiracy theorist from prison, Will Sommer reported for The Bulwark on Monday evening.
Blanche, who got his start as a personal defense lawyer for Trump before being named Deputy Attorney General, hasn't often been on the radar of MAGA, as they have vented against Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel for the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case files controversy.
But the gripe of the MAGA faithful against Blanche doesn't have to do with Epstein, but with Tina Peters, a former Mesa County, Colorado, elections clerk who went to jail for trying to compromise voting equipment in her crusade to prove Trump's election fraud conspiracy theories. According to right-wing insiders, there was a plot to get Peters out of state jail in Colorado, but Blanche put a stop to it.
"The most significant allegation against him comes from Peter Ticktin, a former Trump military-academy chum turned MAGA lawyer who’s now at the center of the get-Blanche campaign," wrote Sommer. "In Ticktin’s telling, the Justice Department was poised last month to essentially rescue his client Peters from Colorado state prison, where she has started serving her nine-year sentence."
"According to Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne — an election denier and Peters friend whom Ticktin is attempting (so far unsuccessfully) to represent in an unrelated trial — the plan was for the Justice Department to claim that Peters is a 'witness' in an unspecified upcoming case. That, in turn, would create a need for her to be in federal custody. Then Peters would have been transferred to a nicer, camp-style prison," said the report. "It all could have worked out, allegedly, had Blanche not intervened!"
Speaking to LindellTV, the project of election conspiracy theorist and MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, Byrne said “Todd Blanche put the kibosh on that," adding that Blanche is a "menace" who is “blocking everything [Trump] says he wants done.” A number of other far-right influencers, like InfoWars' Alex Jones piled on, claiming he also thwarted a review of the civil lawsuits against Jones for inciting harassment of the parents of victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.
As the discontent boils over, some in Trumpworld are now coming to Blanche's defense, with Pam Bondi chief of staff Chad Mizelle posting to X, "Todd Blanche is crushing the deep state. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know Todd, doesn’t know how DOJ works, doesn’t know law, or, most likely, all three."