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Once upon a time, Todd Blanche was Donald Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer. He ran the defense in the Manhattan hush-money case that ended in thirty-four felony convictions in May 2024, and he represented Trump in the two federal cases Jack Smith brought, the classified-documents prosecution in Florida and the election-interference prosecution in the District of Columbia, both of which Smith withdrew after Trump won in November 2024. In March 2025 the Senate confirmed Blanche as Deputy Attorney General, the second-ranking official at the Justice Department that had brought those two federal cases. He is now its Acting Attorney General.
One day, he can be held accountable. Let’s explore some of his current conduct and the relevant federal criminal statutes.
We’ll start with the most recent count, and the one that sits in plain view. On May 19, 2026, Blanche defended before the Senate a nearly $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” created by a settlement he signed, a settlement that resolved Trump’s own lawsuit against the government and barred the IRS from examining the past tax returns of Trump, his family, or his businesses. The fund will pay people who claim they were victims of politicized prosecution, administered by a five-member commission, four of them appointed by the Attorney General and all of them removable by Trump at any time. Blanche would not rule out payments to people convicted of assaulting police officers on January 6. One senator called it a slush fund. Another said the corruption had never been more blatant.
What a future investigation would examine is whether Blanche broke federal conflict-of-interest law, 18 U.S.C. 208, by approving a settlement that benefits the president he serves. That statute makes it a crime for an executive-branch official to participate personally and substantially in a government matter that bears on his own interests, and the willful version is a felony carrying up to five years. The conduct sits in plain view, on a document he signed and defended under oath.
There is a second count under the same law. When Blanche was confirmed, he signed an ethics agreement promising to sell off his cryptocurrency holdings within ninety days and to stay away from any matter that could move their value. He was holding between roughly a hundred and sixty thousand and four hundred and eighty-five thousand dollars in Bitcoin and other tokens at the time.
On the seventh of April, 2025, before he had divested a single coin, he signed a memo titled “Ending Regulation by Prosecution” that halted the department’s open cryptocurrency investigations and dissolved its National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team. He sold nothing until late spring, and when he finally moved the assets he gifted them to his adult children and a grandchild, which kept him technically outside the reach of a statute that names only spouses and minor children. The relevant law is again 18 U.S.C. 208, the willful version carrying up to five years.
The Campaign Legal Center has already laid the conduct against the elements, and six senators followed with a letter accusing him of a glaring conflict. This is the most clear criminal item Blanche has on the public record, because the act, the timing, and the financial interest are all visible on government forms and paint a clear picture of unlawful conduct. His defense would involve some of the following claims: Blanche will say ethics officials cleared the arrangement, and a DOJ spokesperson has said exactly that without naming who did the clearing. The prosecutable question is not whether he had a conflict but whether anyone with authority signed off and what he told them. A grand jury subpoena can answer those questions and if/when law and order are restored federally, that can be explored officially.
The next count moves from money to muscle. In March 2025, Blanche fired the department’s career Pardon Attorney, Elizabeth Oyer, after she refused to recommend restoring the gun rights of Mel Gibson, a Trump friend with a domestic-violence conviction. When she agreed to testify to Congress about her firing, the department sent armed United States Marshals to her home to deliver a letter warning her against testifying. Her lawyer, a former Justice Department inspector general, wrote directly to Blanche that directing armed officers to the home of a former employee who had committed no misconduct, simply to deliver a letter, was both unprecedented and completely inappropriate. Federal law makes it a crime to intimidate or corruptly persuade a witness with intent to influence congressional testimony, which is what 18 U.S.C. 1512 reaches, a felony carrying up to twenty years. The theory is clean in outline and contested in the details, because the marshals delivered a letter rather than a spoken threat, and the government will call the visit routine notice. The facts a prosecutor would need are the letter’s exact language, who ordered the visit, and whether anyone understood the timing. Of every theory in this file, this is the one with a victim, a date, and a paper trail running into Blanche’s own office.
The next count is about what Blanche has said under oath. When the department moved to dismiss the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, the acting United States Attorney in Manhattan, Danielle Sassoon, resigned and described a trade, leniency for Adams in exchange for his cooperation on immigration enforcement. Her account placed Blanche on the same page about the dismissal, while at his confirmation hearing days earlier he had testified he knew nothing beyond press reports. Ten Judiciary Committee Democrats found the gap between his statements and the facts to be wide enough to demand his communications with Emil Bove and to question whether he had testified truthfully. If a future prosecutor could prove he knew more than he claimed, the false-statement statute at 18 U.S.C. 1001 and the perjury statutes come into view, each a felony carrying up to five years. Both counts depend on proving he knew the answer was false when he gave it, which is exactly what the subpoena power would establish.
Under Blanche, the department continues pursuing Letitia James and James Comey, two of the president’s named enemies. The career prosecutor who would not bring the cases was forced out, and Lindsey Halligan, a Trump loyalist with no prosecutorial experience, secured the indictments in his place. A federal judge dismissed both indictments, ruling that Halligan had never been lawfully appointed and as a result had no authority to bring a case at all. So you might be asking yourself, is this prosecutable conduct?
My read is that there is no clean federal path to charging Blanche for the cases he chooses to bring; the law protects those decisions, and the one statute that might catch them, a civil-rights conspiracy under 18 U.S.C. 241 or 242, almost never succeeds against another prosecutor. The chargeable conduct is the lying under oath, the obstruction of justice, and the self-dealing around the prosecutions.
Remember, even the most entrenched regimes can be toppled and replaced. The power is in our hands.
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