On Tuesday, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche took the podium for his first press conference in his new role. It was billed as an announcement of the Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, which he promised would be a super-charged unit poised to attack any fraud on taxpayer dollars. 

But the real news came when Blanche fielded a question from a reporter, who asked whether Blanche recently conceded in public comments that career prosecutors and agents involved in investigations of President Donald Trump were fired for political reasons. 

Blanche responded, “If you were a prosecutor, and you were trying to prosecute your boss, you have ethical duties as a lawyer that I think prevent you from continuing to work in that environment.”

In other words, Blanche suggested the DOJ cleaned house not for political reasons, but for ethical ones. 

Blanche, a former registered Democrat, career prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York and partner at a prestigious, Wall Street-linked law firm has been personally close to the president since he first joined Trump’s team of defense lawyers in 2023.  That closeness is obvious to anyone who has observed them interact; their frequent asides and jokes during Trump’s 2024 Manhattan criminal trial revealed a mutual admiration and even chemistry that no other lawyer representing Trump in recent memory has achieved.

So it was no surprise to hear Blanche, who told that Manhattan jury representing Trump was the honor of his life, sound that theme again yesterday when asked whether he wanted to be Trump’s attorney general. For his part, Trump has not indicated who will land the permanent job.

“I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime,” Blanche said before explaining that whether he keeps his new role, returns to his old one or exits the DOJ entirely, his only goal has been to serve Trump.

But Blanche’s transformation from apolitical, former career prosecutor to unabashed Trump supporter is one thing; his comments Tuesday about whom the DOJ represents reflect yet another unprecedented shift at the DOJ. 

At the press conference, it was MS NOW’s Ken Dilanian who reminded Blanche that he recently said none of the DOJ prosecutors who worked on the Trump investigations remain at the department, and that FBI Director Kash Patel similarly “cleaned house” at the FBI.

In those comments, made at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, Blanche remarked, “[There] isn’t a single man or woman with a gun, federal agent, still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump.”   

Dilanian asked how Blanche would respond to critics who have said those statements were acknowledgements that the Trump administration has fired career civil servants for political reasons.

Blanche’s response raised eyebrows. 

“It’s not that. It’s much more simple than that,” Blanche began. “I mean, look, if you, if you were a prosecutor, and you were trying to prosecute your boss, you have ethical duties as a lawyer that I think prevent you from continuing to work in that environment.”

It is undeniably true that no matter where in the United States an attorney practices, they owe a duty of loyalty and confidentiality to their clients. It is equally true that those duties persist long after the representation has concluded.

Yet ethical standards governing lawyers also provide that a lawyer for an organization — corporate, nonprofit or governmental — owes those duties to the organization itself, not any executive or employee.

That’s equally true of the federal government, former prosecutor and New York Law School professor Rebecca Roiphe told MS NOW.

“The entity that prosecutors represent — the government or the public — is not the same as the individual who is appointed or elected to run that entity,” she explained.

Roiphe, who has written about the ethical obligations of federal prosecutors, added, “The idea that there is an ethical conflict of interest if you were prosecuting the president is absurd. A lawyer for a corporation could easily cooperate with the government in prosecuting the CEO and no one would think those lawyers have a conflict of interest.”

And in a recent law review article with former federal prosecutor and Fordham Law School professor Bruce Green, who directs his school’s legal ethics program, Roiphe also observed that in representing the government itself, federal prosecutors have even more demanding obligations than in a standard attorney-client relationship.

As the Supreme Court noted in its 1935 opinion in Berger v. United States, “The United States Attorney is the representative not of an ordinary party to a controversy, but of a sovereignty whose obligation to govern impartially is as compelling as its obligation to govern at all; and whose interest, therefore, in a criminal prosecution is not that it shall win a case, but that justice shall be done.”

Put another way, as Roiphe and Green wrote, for federal prosecutors, “the public is the principal, not the President.”

And the very reason that presidents have had both White House counsel and their own personal lawyers is specifically because the DOJ does not represent either the Executive Office of the President or the president himself in his personal capacity, much less to the exclusion of any other federal government employee, appointee or entity.

A website listing the available internships in White House departments clearly states the White House Counsel’s office exists to advise the president, the Executive Office of the President, and White House staff on those “legal issues pertaining to the President and the White House.” 

Stephen Gillers, a law professor emeritus at New York University School of Law and prominent legal ethicist, agreed with Roiphe that there is no ethical reason for prosecutors involved in the now-closed Trump investigations to leave the DOJ.

“Lawyers at DOJ who, before Trump 2.0 had been trying to prosecute him are not ethically required to leave DOJ now,” he said.

“Firing them on the ground that they could not ethically remain at DOJ is wrong,” he added.

That Blanche’s understanding of who DOJ lawyers represent and what ethical duties they owe may be wrong is, of course, small comfort to the scores of DOJ employees who have been fired or forced out.

Nor is it reassuring to career prosecutors who could be asked to work on what some critics consider unfounded, politically motivated investigations and prosecutions of Trump’s stated enemies.

After all, Blanche also said yesterday that among the thousands of DOJ investigations and prosecutions underway, “it is true that some of them involve men, women, and entities that the President in the past has had issues with and that [he] believe[s] should be investigated. That is his right, and indeed, it is his duty to do that, meaning, to lead this country.”

The question now is this: If Trump is indeed the DOJ’s primary client, as Blanche suggested yesterday, can justice, as the Supreme Court conceived it, truly be done?

The post Todd Blanche’s first press conference reveals DOJ’s new primary client: Trump appeared first on MS NOW.

From MS Now.