Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche touted the Justice Department’s efforts to fire President Donald Trump’s opponents, saying it has “cleaned house” at the FBI to remove anyone associated with prosecutions against him.
Blanche, speaking Thursday to a friendly audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas, Texas, said “there isn’t a man or woman with a gun who participated” in the Russia investigation left within the FBI.
He said more than 200 people who were involved in Trump prosecutions have either left or were forced to leave the department.
Blanche also pushed back on critics who have said the DOJ has moved slowly to go after Trump opponents at the agency.
“To folks who say we have done nothing. I say you have a very short memory,” Blanche said.
Blanche spoke on a variety of topics at CPAC, including the president’s push to remove “rogue judges” and trying to get fair jury trials for law enforcement. Blanche served as Trump’s lead criminal defense counsel for his 2024 “hush money” trial in New York.
The deputy attorney general attacked “activist judges” for rulings that haven’t been in Trump’s favor, and said appointing conservative judges is a top priority for the White House.
“Getting great judges, getting conservative judges who want to do nothing more than follow the Constitution and follow the morals of which this country was built on and what makes us great is without a doubt a priority of Day One in the White House counsel, the president, and everyone in this administration,” Blanche said.
On Wednesday night, Trump urged Republicans on Capitol Hill to pass legislation to rein in judges, while slamming jurists as “criminals” who hurt the country with their rulings.
Additionally, Blanche said he wants to help bring big cases to red cities and states due to what he says is bias in blue cities for some trials.
Blanche gave an example of federal agents being assaulted in Democratic-run cities having to be tried in those places.
“It’s tough because our laws require us to bring cases where the conduct occurred, but there’s a lot of ways that we can work within that to get some of our cases to where we want them to be and where we’re going to have a judge we know is going to be fair,” Blanche said.
The DOJ has suffered multiple losses when it has tried to bring charges against protesters accused of assaulting federal agents. Three grand juries declined to return indictments in cases brought last year, a trend one federal judge in Chicago described as “virtually unheard of,” until Immigration and Customs Enforcement cracked down on the city.
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