Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday that Americans should be "happy" President Donald Trump is deeply involved with the Justice Department.
Asked in an interview with NBC News about a communication Trump sent to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in which he publicly implored her to indict several of his political enemies, Blanche said it was an example of the president being upfront with the American people and making his "high expectations" clear.
"That type of communication from President Trump should make every American happy," Blanche said. "It means that there's an executive, a chief executive, that is making sure every one of his Cabinet members are working as hard as they should."
Blanche became the acting head of the Justice Department this month after Trump fired Bondi, in part, because the president was frustrated that she did not have more success in prosecutions of his political foes, NBC News reported.
Blanche on Tuesday promised to prioritize what the Trump administration has called the “weaponization” of the Justice Department by Democrats against Trump, his allies and some right-wing groups.
But Blanche is expected to run into the same issues as Bondi; subpoenas for the Federal Reserve and Chairman Jerome Powell were blocked by a federal judge, and cases against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey were dismissed by a judge. The Justice Department is, however, weighing whether to try again on Comey, NBC News reported.
Blanche's comments Tuesday stood in stark contrast to other Justice Department leaders, who had strived to set up firewalls between the White House and the DOJ, allowing the administration to influence policy but not criminal investigations.
He described Trump as "my boss" and said the investigations into Trump’s political enemies were only a small part of the Justice Department's overall work.
“There is outsized focus” on those probes, “because they involve individuals that the president has had significant issues — for good reason, by the way, within the past that will continue the rest of the time he’s president,” Blanche said.
Directing the Justice Department, he said, is "what being the commander in chief is about."
The Justice Department also failed to indict six sitting members of Congress over a social media video that Trump labeled “SEDITIOUS” because it encouraged members of the military and intelligence communities not to obey unlawful orders. Grand jurors rejected the claims.
Blanche said Tuesday the failed investigations showed “that we’re working hard.”
"It could be that the grand jury just made the wrong decision," he said, speaking broadly about failed indictments. "The grand jurors don't get everything right, just like nobody gets everything right all the time. So some of those, it's a tough case, and some of those we're continuing to investigate. You don't have to just take a 'no true bill' from a grand jury and walk away."
Blanche indicated that federal prosecutors could continue to pursue cases that had been rejected by federal grand jurors.
"There’s plenty of times that we get ‘no true bills’ that you don’t hear about,” he said. "It's part of our system."
Last week, in his first public appearance as acting attorney general, he insisted the Justice Department was not focused on going after Trump’s political enemies.
Blanche served for more than a year as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 spot overseeing the department’s daily operations. Prior to joining the administration, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney, seeing him through multiple indictments. Trump has said he has done nothing wrong.
Like Bondi, Blanche has been embroiled in the public battle over the Justice Department’s handling of its review of the case against Jeffrey Epstein, the politically connected sex offender who died by suicide in federal lockup while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019.
Blanche had announced in December that the Justice Department would release hundreds of thousands of files, and then it released only a small fraction of that amount.
The department made public millions more files at the end of January. Millions were withheld, most of which Blanche said were duplicates, but about 200,000 were held back or redacted for various legal reasons.
On Tuesday, Blanche defended the Justice Department's efforts to prosecute Epstein, but also said there should have been more investigation sooner. He also suggested that he did not think Trump would consider pardoning Epstein's convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.
"We have said to victims, 'You can come talk to the FBI any day of the week if you have information that we need to know to help us bring charges against anybody'," he said.
Blanche spoke as the Justice Department released its first report from its “weaponization working group,” focused on enforcement of the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, which was passed in 1994 in the wake of attacks on abortion clinics and providers. The report argued that federal prosecutors had been working too closely with outside groups that tracked anti-abortion protesters.
At least four Justice Department employees were fired ahead of the report's release, according to one person familiar with the firings. A Justice Department spokesperson said that “DOJ has terminated the employment of personnel responsible for weaponizing the FACE Act who still remained at the department.”
Blanche said Tuesday that, if confirmed as attorney general, he'd make it a priority to “get rid of all the pure weaponization," claiming that during the Biden administration the Justice Department headquarters “was turned into just a political arm of the White House.”
