Todd Blanche, confirmed to run the Justice Department last week, declined on two Sunday shows (Aug. 16) to promise the department will act independently of the White House.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Sunday, Aug. 16, that Trump's views can factor into decisions about individual prosecutions. In appearances on Fox News's "Fox News Sunday" and NBC's "Meet the Press," he declined to promise that the Justice Department would always act independently of the White House. Blanche said Trump has never asked him to prosecute a specific person and never would. He also told Fox host Shannon Bream that his proposed "anti-weaponization" fund, which would have compensated people who said they were politically persecuted, "is dead" and that Trump knows it.
What the independence norm is, and where it came from
- The wall between the White House and DOJ case decisions is custom, not law — it was built after Watergate, when Richard Nixon used the department against political enemies.
- Attorney General Griffin Bell wrote the first formal contacts policy in 1978; every administration since has issued its own version limiting who at the White House may call DOJ about a case.
- Blanche was Trump's personal defense lawyer in the 2024 New York hush-money trial before joining the department — the first time in modern history a president's private criminal attorney has run the DOJ.