Newly appointed acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said last week that officials who were involved in criminal prosecutions of President Donald Trump no longer remain at the Justice Department and FBI.
He described the overhaul as a restoration of impartial justice after years of politicization.
Blanche, elevated to acting attorney general Thursday after Trump removed Attorney General Pam Bondi, made the comments in a CPAC fireside chat with Chair Matt Schlapp while serving as deputy attorney general.
Trump announced the change on Truth Social, naming Blanche, his former personal attorney, as interim leader of the department.
Blanche said more than 200 Justice Department employees with any connection to the Trump cases had either departed before the new administration arrived, been fired, or taken early retirement.
“There is not a single man or woman at the Department of Justice who had anything to do with those prosecutions,” he said.
He reported a parallel situation at the FBI under Director Kash Patel.
“There isn’t a single man or woman with a gun, a federal agent still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump,” Blanche said.
The remarks came amid ongoing efforts to address what Blanche called the weaponization of federal law enforcement. He pointed to the Russia investigation led by former special counsel Robert Mueller as “a complete and total hoax” that “almost brought down President Trump” and represented “the worst sort of weaponization” of government, Congress, prosecutors, and the FBI.
Blanche, who personally defended Trump in the business records case brought by the Manhattan district attorney and the federal prosecutions brought by then-special counsel Jack Smith, credited voters with the first major shift.
He argued that past administrations, including Republican ones, had tolerated partisan actors inside the executive branch, but this one would not.
“President Trump, for the first time in modern history, has said, ‘I am the president. And if you work in the executive branch, you work for me,'” Blanche said. “We do not” accept partisan actors.
Blanche cited state-level prosecutions as examples of politicized justice.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis represented “the best examples of the pure weaponization by the left of our system of justice,” he said. Willis’ case was “completely annihilated,” he added.
The acting attorney general highlighted early accomplishments under the administration, including pardons or commutations for all Jan. 6 defendants by 5 p.m. on Inauguration Day.
He touted reversals of policies targeting Christian organizations, the restoration of Second Amendment rights, the end of most federal consent decrees on local police departments, and intensified efforts against drug traffickers.
“We are treating drug dealers like the narco-terrorists that they are,” Blanche said, recounting a meeting with an “angel mom” that morning.
He said the department works seven days a week and has achieved more in its first year than any previous administration.
Jim Thomas ✉
Jim Thomas is a writer based in Indiana. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Political Science, a law degree from U.I.C. Law School, and has practiced law for more than 20 years.
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