Todd Blanche spent the formative part of his career as a minister of justice, and that phrase is not decoration. It is the constitutional job description of the American prosecutor, the settled principle that the government’s lawyer serves the law rather than a side, that his duty is to see justice done and not merely to win. Blanche lived inside that duty for the better part of a decade. He put himself through Brooklyn Law School at night while working as a paralegal in the United States Attorney’s office, became an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York, and rose to co-chief of the division’s White Plains office. He was, for those years, a career prosecutor who understood from the inside, and in fine detail, exactly what the power of the Justice Department is for and exactly where its limits are supposed to sit.
Photo: New York Times
What he did with that understanding is the subject of this file. He left the government for the defense bar, which is honorable work, and in 2023 he left his firm to represent Donald Trump across the criminal cases then closing in on the former president. Defending an unpopular client is not a betrayal. It is the adversarial system operating exactly as designed, and nothing in these Files faults a lawyer for taking a hard case. The betrayal is the move that came next, the one the system is built specifically to forbid. Blanche carried the client through the courtroom, and then he carried him into the Justice Department itself, and once inside he ran the department that is supposed to be the client’s neutral arbiter as if it were still the client’s defense firm, with himself as the managing partner and the United States as the retainer.