On Thursday, Trump announced he had chosen members of his defence team for senior justice department roles.
Todd Blanche, who represented Trump in multiple criminal cases, will be nominated for the second most powerful post at the Justice Department – deputy attorney general.
While Trump’s attorneys have more traditional experience than Gaetz, Trump’s stated intentions to remake the department and pursue “the enemy within,” along with the nominations, have raised questions among legal scholars about the future of the Justice Department.
It is not unheard of for US presidents to appoint close legal allies to the justice department and other judicial posts.
Since the Watergate era, however, the justice department has sought to position itself as mostly independent from the president.
For Donald Trump, they battled the law. And now they will assist him in enforcing it.
Trump declared on Thursday that he had selected members of his defense team for senior positions in the justice department.
Todd Blanche, who has represented Trump in a number of criminal cases, is set to receive a nomination for deputy attorney general, the second most important position at the Justice Department. Emil Bove, a lawyer involved in Trump’s hush-money case in New York, will also assume a senior position within the department.
His choice for US solicitor general will be D. John Sauer, who prevailed in Trump’s landmark case involving presidential immunity this year in the US Supreme Court.
Trump’s choice for US attorney general, Matt Gaetz, a conservative who has been an unwavering supporter of the president-elect, would be their boss if they are all confirmed.
The nominations and Trump’s declared plans to restructure the department and go after “the enemy within” have caused legal experts to wonder about the Justice Department’s future, even though Trump’s lawyers have more conventional experience than Gaetz.
Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at the New York Law School, stated that it is “quite a clear signal that he is taking the justice department in a direction of loyalty to him rather than independence, which has been the tradition up to this point.”.
The three attorneys demonstrated their ability to be innovative and dependable in their support of Trump during his fight against four different criminal indictments in the previous year.
Mr. Blanche will begin “repairing what has been a broken System of Justice for far too long,” Trump declared. “”.
Both Mr. Bove and Mr. Blanche have prior experience in the justice department, having served in the Southern District of New York (SDNY), which is arguably its most prestigious jurisdiction.
Before joining the esteemed WilmerHale law firm and going it alone, Mr. Blanche rose to the position of head of violent crimes at the SDNY. There, he took on the most well-known criminal defendant in America.
“They have relevant experience, definitely prosecutorial experience,” Professor Jonathan Nash of the Emory School of Law stated.
He added that a deputy attorney general would benefit from Mr. Blanche’s managerial experience from his time at the SDNY.
At the criminal trial in New York earlier this year, Mr. Blanche frequently sparred with the judge and openly attacked the character of witnesses, adopting some of Trump’s bombastic posturing. According to some analysts, Trump’s defeat might have been influenced by these strategies.
But in a few days, Mr. Blanche might achieve his greatest triumph to date: he could overturn the only criminal conviction that Trump had received during his hush-money trial. Trump’s conviction in New York should be overturned, he and Mr. Bove have argued.
Mr. Sauer would represent the government in Supreme Court cases in his capacity as US solicitor general. His prior tenure as Missouri’s solicitor general, according to legal experts, makes him an obvious choice.
Before the country’s highest court, Mr. Sauer had already won a significant victory for Trump, who was trying to prevent federal prosecution of his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
Mr. Sauer was successful in persuading the Supreme Court that presidents ought to be exempt from criminal prosecution for specific “official acts” committed while in office.
Mr. Sauer recently argued before an appeals court in New York that Trump’s nine-figure fine from a civil fraud trial ought to be reversed. The court has not yet rendered a ruling.
The appointment of close legal allies to the Justice Department and other judicial positions by US presidents is not unprecedented.
In the 1960s, Robert F. Kennedy, his brother, was appointed US attorney general by President John F. Kennedy. Abe Fortas was selected by President Lyndon B. Johnson to serve on the Supreme Court.
But the justice department has worked to portray itself as largely independent of the president since the Watergate scandal.
Trump, however, defied that standard. For withdrawing from an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, he dismissed Jeff Sessions as attorney general during his first term. The second, William Barr, resigned after denying Trump’s unfounded allegations of massive election fraud in 2020.
