Todd Blanche

Todd Blanche is an American lawyer who served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, represented Donald Trump in three of the criminal cases brought against him in 2023 and 2024, and became Deputy Attorney General in March 2025, acting Attorney General on April 2, 2026, and the 88th Attorney General on August 10, 2026.¹ As the department's second official he personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell in July 2025 and directed the publication of the Epstein Files.

Prosecutor and Defense Lawyer

Blanche spent nearly fifteen years at the Department of Justice, first as a contractor and as a paralegal in the Criminal Division and the United States Attorney's office in Manhattan, then as an Assistant United States Attorney and supervisor there.¹ In 2017 he became a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, where he represented Trump's former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, the Rudy Giuliani associate Igor Fruman and the Trump adviser Boris Epshteyn. He won dismissal of the mortgage fraud indictment brought against Manafort by the Manhattan District Attorney's office, the office that later prosecuted Trump, on double jeopardy grounds. In April 2023 he left the firm, writing to colleagues: "I have been asked to represent Trump in the recently charged DA case, and after much thought/consideration, I have decided it is the best thing for me to do and an opportunity I should not pass up." He represented Trump in the Manhattan hush money trial, in which Trump was convicted, and in the federal election and classified documents prosecutions brought by Jack Smith.²

Trump named him for Deputy Attorney General after the 2024 election. The Senate confirmed him on March 5, 2025, by 52 to 46; the nomination listed him as "of Florida."³

The Maxwell Interview

On July 24 and 25, 2025, two weeks after the department's unsigned memorandum declaring that no "client list" existed and a week after The Wall Street Journal reported a birthday letter bearing Trump's signature in the album Maxwell compiled for Epstein, Blanche met Maxwell at the federal correctional institution in Tallahassee to question her about Epstein's associates, under a grant of limited immunity.⁴⁵ Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Dick Durbin wrote to him that it "is highly unusual, if not unprecedented" for the Deputy Attorney General rather than a line prosecutor to conduct such an interview.⁵ About a week later, on August 1, the Federal Bureau of Prisons moved Maxwell to the minimum-security Federal Prison Camp Bryan in Texas. Whitehouse wrote to the bureau's director, William K. Marshall III, that bureau policy requires sex offenders to be held "at a minimum, at low-security facilities," that "Ms. Maxwell was transferred without explanation and in possible violation of standard Bureau policy," and that the statutory placement factors "do not include whether the person can provide the President with political favors."⁵ The department released a 337-page transcript of the interview on August 22, 2025; in it Maxwell spoke of Trump and other men associated with Epstein largely in exculpatory terms.⁶ When the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform deposed her in February 2026, she invoked the Fifth Amendment to every question, and her lawyer said she would testify if Trump granted her clemency.⁷

The Epstein Files

Blanche's office issued the department's announcement of January 30, 2026, that it had published "over 3 million additional pages," bringing the total to nearly 3.5 million, and he signed, with Attorney General Pam Bondi, the accompanying letter to Congress stating that about 200,000 pages had been withheld or redacted on grounds of privilege.⁸ After Representative Thomas Massie reported on February 9, 2026, that an FBI document naming co-conspirators had a "well known retired CEO" redacted, Blanche identified the man as Leslie Wexner and wrote: "We have just unredacted Les Wexner's name from this document, but his name already appears in the files thousands of times. DOJ is hiding nothing." He told Massie to "stop grandstanding."⁹¹⁰ Wexner's representative said a prosecutor had told his lawyers in 2019 that he was "neither a co-conspirator nor target in any respect."¹¹ On February 14 Blanche signed the report to the Judiciary Committees listing about 300 officials and "politically exposed persons" named in the files.¹²

Attorney General

Trump named Blanche acting Attorney General when he removed Bondi on April 2, 2026. Blanche said on Fox News that he had never heard Trump say the decision had anything to do with the Epstein files.¹³ The Senate confirmed him in an overnight vote on August 8, 2026, by 50 to 49, after cloture was invoked by the same margin. All Democrats and the Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voted against him; Mitch McConnell was absent, and Bill Cassidy's support secured the majority. The two cited concerns ranging from the Epstein files to a proposed "anti-weaponization" fund; Collins said that "the Department of Justice has become increasingly political"; Murkowski said she was not convinced he would "check the worst impulses of this administration."¹⁴ He was sworn in on August 10, 2026.¹