Jockeying for Attorney General Spot Begins

Deputy AG Todd Blanche is the acting AG for now. Will President Trump seek his confirmation or select someone else?

It appears the jockeying to replace Pam Bondi, the former attorney general fired by the president earlier this month, has begun.

After losing the president’s support and earning the ire of the MAGA base, Bondi is now headed back to private life. As I wrote here, her tenure represented a disappointing chapter in the president’s first year in office despite some success in the face of nearly insurmountable obstacles.

But President Trump and his supporters want blood and Bondi failed to produce. The Weaponization Working Group she created more than a year ago has yet to issue a report; at least two individuals recently resigned from the group.

Fortunately, the president has a strong roster of replacements to consider. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is the acting attorney general for now; he held a fiery press conference this week defending the department’s work and reminding selectively amnesiac reporters how the Biden Department of Justice relentless pursued the president, his associates, and his supporters for four years:

Blanche is moving into the AG’s fifth-floor office on Monday. On Thursday, according to CNN, Blanche distributed a series of memos to notify DOJ employees that “President Trump has promised a safe America and will continue to deliver on that promise.”

A safe America, as Blanche undoubtedly knows, also requires accountability for those who abused government power to destroy the lives of their political opponents. And that simply has not happened in any meaningful way, hence the president’s justified frustration. Could a good old-fashioned internal rivalry among potential AG candidates turn on the jets at the DOJ, invigorating a demoralized MAGA base currently fearing history will repeat itself—that a Trump DOJ once again comes up empty in the retribution category just like his first term?

Blanche could be the guy to finally produce some results. After all, he defended the president in both Special Counsel Jack Smith’s documents case and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s so-called “hush money” indictment. He held a front-row seat in watching Smith’s team of thugs consistently mislead Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, misrepresent evidence, and throw one temper tantrum after another when they didn’t get their way. Hard to imagine that experience is a distant memory, rather than an animating force, in Blanche’s mind.

Smith, of course, is at the top of MAGA’s hit list; his recent Congressional testimony, in addition to his overall conduct in the documents case, provides plenty of fodder to represent the basis of a criminal indictment. In fact, the DOJ is still sitting on a criminal referral for Thomas Windom, Smith’s lead prosecutor in the January 6 case in Washington. House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Jordan referred Windom last November for obstruction after he repeatedly refused to answer questions related to his involvement in the case.

Activist Judges and Juries Still the Biggest Obstacle

Indicting Windom seems like an easy early victory for Blanche. Ditto for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney in Washington, who would actually hand up any indictment against Windom. She, too, is in the running although Pirro’s string of bad luck with D.C. grand and trial juries—by no fault of her own, as I explained here—may not restore much-needed confidence among the base. Pirro’s office has only won half of the criminal cases brought before D.C. juries this year, adding to an already mediocre record.

A former prosecutor who previously worked at the office claims Pirro has “lost the jury pool,” which is a nice way of placing the blame on Pirro’s prosecutors rather than acknowledging that the residents of the most Democratic city in the country are engaged in flagrant jury nullification to deny the Trump DOJ any wins in court.

Which will remain a massive problem regardless of who permanently takes the reins of the department. Can a bold, creative attorney general figure out how to circumvent the most hyper-partisan courthouse in the nation (this includes nearly every judge, too) and seek indictments and trials outside of Washington?

If Trump looks outside of existing DOJ officials, EPA administrator Lee Zeldin is a solid option. Zeldin, a former Republican Congressman who made an impressive showing against Kathy Hochul in the 2022 New York governor’s race, hit the ground running at the EPA by uncovering the $20 billion climate scandal initiated by the Biden administration right before the 2024 election. (My backgrounder here. More from EPA here.)

An attorney and former military man, Zeldin, 46, made arguably the most consequential decision of Trump’s presidency so far: rescinding the Obama-era “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases. The move essentially represented the end of the climate change movement, impacting government, academia, and private industry in a way no other policy decision could.

Zeldin’s hard-knuckled approach, intelligence, and political sensibilities provide the right combination in moving fast against the president’s lawfare antagonists.

Others are in the running as well: Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon (who appears to be backing Blanche according to her X post to me this week), Senator Mike Lee, and White House Counsel David Warrington. All require Senate confirmation.

So the president should move quickly to avoid a similar quagmire created by other expired temporary appointments in the DOJ. Further, the midterm election is less than seven months away; mixed views on the Iran war, infighting among MAGA-aligned influencers, and a less-than-stellar economy has much of the MAGA base rattled, if not wholly disillusioned. An ass-kicking AG handing down long-desired indictments this summer could be the elixir Trump and his supporters need.