Attorney General Todd Blanche looks anxious pushing President Donald Trump's revenge investigation that has little to do with justice, an analyst wrote.
In a Saturday piece for her emptywheel blog, legal analyst Marcy Wheeler argued that Blanche is steering the so-called "grand conspiracy" investigation to protect his own position, pointing to his "flopsweat efforts to deliver on Trump's demands for revenge."
Wheeler built her argument around a New York Times report on the turmoil inside the probe, including a bitter clash between Blanche and Joe diGenova, the veteran Republican lawyer who quit the investigation amid the dispute.
The Justice Department probe seeks to prove that former law enforcement and intelligence leaders plotted against Trump, and its targets include former CIA Director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and former FBI Director James Comey.
According to The Times, diGenova told an associate he believed Blanche was more focused on quick indictments of minor figures to please Trump than on building a real case, and that Blanche was too worried about his job to tell the president the investigation needed time. Blanche's team, in turn, viewed diGenova as disorganized and sluggish.
Tensions peaked after Blanche sent two prosecutors from Washington to Florida to take control. In response, diGenova threatened to have U.S. marshals remove them from the grand jury room, and Blanche answered with an expletive-filled phone call, the paper reported.
"Blanche is approaching the Grand Conspiracy in a way to avoid getting fired, not in a way to prosecute anyone," Wheeler wrote.
She noted The Times account traces Blanche losing faith in one lawyer after another, from David Metcalf, who first supervised the case in Philadelphia, to national security prosecutor Maria Medetis Long, U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones and finally diGenova.
The exception is Aakash Singh, who now oversees the probe despite his ties to other politically charged cases that fell apart. "Why is Singh the one in whom Blanche retains confidence, when he is the architect of so much Blanche failure?" Wheeler asked.
Wheeler also took aim at Blanche's remarks this week on the conservative podcast "RuthLess," in which he blamed former prosecutors for souring public perception of the department. "It's just the former prosecutors impugning DOJ's reputation, not the judges serially describing how DOJ's presumption of regularity has collapsed," she quipped.
She also wondered what makes the job worth such effort, questioning why Blanche would pursue "pointless indictments" to satisfy Trump.