As his first full week as a Senate-confirmed attorney general neared its end, Todd Blanche took some time Thursday to deliver a 19-minute prepared speech to the Justice Department’s workforce. The remarks were striking, but not in the way his many critics might have expected.

As a Politico report noted, the Republican lawyer’s speech stood out “more for what he didn’t say than what he did.”

There were no strident attacks on the Biden administration’s stewardship of the department, no denunciations of “activist” federal judges and no calls to end the weaponization of law enforcement — all topics that have featured prominently in some of Blanche’s public remarks as a senior department official over the past year and a half.

Instead, Blanche emphasized to DOJ employees that he was one of them, committed to continuing work the Justice Department has done for generations, often with little change from administration to administration.

A casual observer who watched the remarks probably would have thought he sounded like a normal attorney general in a normal administration.

“What I have seen over the past 30 years, working intimately with this department, is that this department succeeds when people of different backgrounds, different politics, different life experiences put the mission of the department first,” Blanche said. He added, “We will not engage in or stand for any sort of performative attacks that undermine the institutions that we are sworn to uphold.”

The disconnect between the attorney general’s rhetoric and his record was extraordinary. It was as if he were describing the jurisprudential vision of an entirely different person.

Blanche claimed, for example, that he believes in a Justice Department filled with personnel with “different politics,” despite his appearance at a Conservative Political Action Conference event in the spring, when he bragged about “all these people are leaving or getting fired” at the DOJ as part of a broader political purge.

This is also the same attorney general who’s argued publicly that it’s Trump’s “right,” and “indeed it is his duty,” to use the department to investigate people he “has had issues with.”

As for the contention that the Blanche-led DOJ “will not engage in or stand for any sort of performative attacks,” it stands to reason that this may come as something of a surprise to former FBI Director James Comey, who’s currently facing outlandish criminal charges over allegations that he used Instagram to call for violence against Trump by way of a seashell-related code — a case that Blanche has been happy to defend.

It would be great if the attorney general who spoke on Thursday afternoon were believable, and the vision he sketched out in his remarks were credible. But to accept Blanche’s words at face value would require ignoring everything he’s said and done since arriving at Main Justice early last year.

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