Attorney General Todd Blanche has been empowered by his confirmation to transform the entire Justice Department in President Donald Trump's image, former federal prosecutor Harry Litman warned in his Talking Feds Substack.
The DOJ is no stranger to being overtaken by corruption, noted Litman. For instance, "John Mitchell ran Richard Nixon’s dirty tricks and went to federal prison for it," while way back under former President Warren Harding, "Harry Doherty turned the Department into a vehicle for graft, his cronies selling pardons and immunities like so many indulgences, earning the DOJ the nickname 'the Department of Easy Virtue.'"
The difference, he said, is that "none of these AG’s was suggesting that the conduct was exemplary. Blanche, by contrast, has openly taken a blowtorch to standards that have been articles of faith at the DOJ for 50 years. Puffed up with his confirmation, he’s taken on a renewed cockiness — arrogance, really — and proclaimed his and Donald Trump’s perverted account of the attorney general as the new norm."
Blanche set the tone immediately when he proclaimed on TV that he would not pledge to operate independently from the president. Previous attorneys general, even those caught in scandal, emphatically stressed they represented the interests of the United States, not the president.
He then attended a political rally, driving the point home further, while publicly rejecting court orders against the administration on Trump's ballroom project — all while brazenly proclaiming, “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”
Past corrupt attorneys general, concluded Litman, may have had scandals on Blanche's scale, but "none tried to change what it was. Blanche is attacking the institution at its foundations in broad daylight, sawing away at the principles it was built on and requiring its basic mission. That is why his first week belongs in a shameful category of its own."