Trump Picks Trio of His Lawyers for Top Justice Positions (3)

President-elect Donald Trump announced plans to put three of his personal defense lawyers in top Justice Department jobs.

If confirmed, Todd Blanche, a former Manhattan federal prosecutor who represented Trump in his New York hush money case, would be second-in-command at the Justice Department as deputy attorney general.

Another one of his personal lawyers in the hush money case, Emil Bove, will serve as the principal associate deputy attorney general and as acting deputy attorney general, Trump said. That position doesn’t require Senate confirmation.

Trump separately said he plans to nominate John Sauer, his personal lawyer who argued his immunity case at the Supreme Court last term, to be US Solicitor General.

The selections signal the president-elect’s further commitment to install loyalists with whom he has personal relationships to oversee US law enforcement, after he’s expressed disappointment that attorneys general and other top DOJ officials in his prior term didn’t approve his requests.

The three announcements came one day after Trump’s selection of Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) as attorney general. Gaetz resigned his seat after the announcement.

A former Big Law partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP, Blanche opened his own legal practice in 2023 as he started taking on Trump’s legal affairs.

He also once represented Trump’s 2016 campaign manager Paul Manafort on state charges that were eventually dismissed and supported the president-elect’s defense teams in the federal indictments brought by DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith.

“Todd is an excellent attorney who will be a crucial leader in the Justice Department, fixing what has been a broken System of Justice for too long,” Trump said in a Thursday post on Truth Social.

He previously spent eight years prosecuting at the US attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, including as supervisor in the violent crimes unit and White Plains division.

Blanche hasn’t previously worked at DOJ headquarters in Washington, where, if confirmed as deputy, he’d be responsible for day-to-day operations of a bureaucracy with 115,000 employees.

He was registered as a New York Democrat as recently as 2023, before registering as a Florida Republican this year, according to the New York Times.

The Brooklyn Law School graduate would bring a DOJ pedigree alongside a leader in Gaetz who’s never been at the department. Former DOJ officials have said the next AG would benefit from department alums at his side in order to implement a Trump agenda calling for major changes in federal law enforcement operations.