Todd Blanche, Donald Trump's former defence lawyer who is now serving as acting US attorney general, was directly involved in driving the former president's revenge agenda from inside the Department of Justice, according to newly leaked emails released in Washington this week.
The documents, obtained by watchdog group American Oversight, emerge just days before Blanche faces a Senate hearing that will decide whether he becomes Trump's permanent attorney general.
Blanche has for months been described by Trump allies as the steady hand at the top of the Justice Department, the institutionalist supposedly restraining the president's more vengeful instincts. That narrative is now badly frayed.
The correspondence shows Blanche was not merely aware of the so‑called 'anti‑weaponisation' drive against Trump's perceived enemies, but actively orchestrating it, reassigning senior lawyers and signing off on some of the administration's most contentious legal moves.
Todd Blanche And The 'Anti‑Weaponisation' Project
The emails, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, place Blanche at the centre of a Justice Department unit charged with enacting Trump's 'anti‑weaponisation' agenda. The White House has pitched this initiative as a clean‑up operation, a way to root out what it claims was partisan misuse of federal law enforcement against Trump and his supporters.
Critics see something far blunter. In their telling, 'anti‑weaponisation' is simply a rebrand of political score‑settling, turning the Justice Department into an arm of Trump's grievances against those who investigated, prosecuted or otherwise crossed him.
According to the documents, Blanche's role intensified last year while he was serving as top deputy to then attorney general Pam Bondi. After Bondi's departure, he continued to oversee the effort.
In May 2025, the acting attorney general reassigned senior lawyers from his own office into the anti‑weaponisation group, effectively giving himself a direct line into cases targeting some of Trump's most prominent adversaries.
Those internal moves mattered. One Blanche aide was tasked with examining special counsel Jack Smith, who prosecuted Trump over classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result. Another was instructed to review Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office secured Trump's conviction on 34 felony counts linked to hush money payments to adult film actor Stormy Daniels.
A third aide was assigned to look into Tina Peters, the former Colorado election clerk convicted after attempting to access voting equipment while chasing debunked claims of election fraud.
On paper, such reviews can be framed as oversight. In practice, the selection of targets reads like a checklist of Trump's legal nemeses.
Inside Todd Blanche's Justice Department
The emails do not stop at staffing charts. They also point to Blanche's involvement in specific flashpoint decisions that have already alarmed current and former Justice Department officials.
He approved the indictment of former FBI director James Comey after Comey posted an image on social media of seashells spelling out '86 47' on a beach. Trump supporters loudly insisted the arrangement was coded language for removing Trump, the 47th president. Comey denied that reading. Blanche nonetheless signed off on charges, a move widely interpreted among legal observers as an extraordinary escalation of a long‑running feud.
Blanche also endorsed a proposed $1.77 billion (£1.32 billion) taxpayer‑funded settlement related to defendants charged over the 6 January attack on the US Capitol. On top of that, he supported an agreement that would have given Trump and his family sweeping protections from future tax investigations. Both efforts later ran into major legal challenges, but the emails cast Blanche not as a reluctant gatekeeper, rather as an active sponsor.
Another strand of the leak centres on Ed Martin, a former Justice Department official brought in to supervise reviews of two subjects Trump has repeatedly fixated on. Martin was placed over inquiries into the treatment of January 6 defendants and into President Joe Biden's use of an autopen to sign documents.
Despite that apparent alignment with Trump's interests, the emails suggest Blanche doubted Martin's experience and performance, and eventually removed him from the anti‑weaponisation role. Even after Martin was sidelined, the wider programme of investigations into Trump's critics and opponents continued to grow.
The Justice Department has not publicly disputed the authenticity of the emails. However, nothing in the leaks has yet been tested in court, and several of the more politically charged interpretations of Blanche's motives remain unverified and should be treated with caution.
How is Blanche Perceived By Others
What is not in much doubt is the political fallout. More than 1,200 former Justice Department officials have signed a letter urging the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject Blanche's nomination as attorney general, accusing him of presiding over 'corruption and abuses' and of damaging the department's traditionally nonpartisan career workforce. They argue the leaked correspondence confirms a pattern they have watched with alarm from the outside.
Blanche's supporters, meanwhile, still present him as a stabilising presence, the person preventing Trump's crusade against the 'deep state' from slipping into outright chaos. The emails now circulating in Washington tell a colder story, of a lawyer who followed his client into power and, far from stepping on the brakes, took the wheel.
Nothing in the leaked material confirms every allegation levelled at Blanche or the department, and further disclosures could yet complicate the picture. For the senators about to question him, though, the emails ensure one uncomfortable premise will hang over the hearing: whether the man vying to lead the Justice Department has already been using it as a tool of presidential revenge.
