New Attorney General, Same Albatross: Trump’s Quest for Retribution

 

News Analysis

New Attorney General, Same Albatross: Trump’s Quest for Retribution

 

The name atop the Justice Department’s organizational chart matters less than the presence of a president whose demands for revenge have become so extreme that even his most obsequious appointees have fallen short.

 

Alan Feuer Glenn Thrush

By Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush

April 4, 2026, 5:02 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/04/us/politics/attorney-general-trump.html

 

President Trump’s pick to replace Pam Bondi will face the same conundrum that every attorney general he has hired and fired has confronted: It is hard to steer the Justice Department when the president is grabbing the wheel and stepping on the gas.

 

Mr. Trump is searching for a tougher version of Ms. Bondi but the fault lies not in the shirking weakness of those he has called upon to execute his will, but rather in the impossibility of his request — to bring criminal charges against political targets with little to no evidence or legal justification.

 

The president has settled for the moment on Ms. Bondi’s chief deputy and his former defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, whose grasp of legal matters and low-key personality represent a contrast from the voluble, less lawyerly Ms. Bondi.

 

Yet the name atop the Justice Department’s organizational chart matters less than the overbearing presence of a president whose demands for retribution against his enemies have become so frequent and extreme that even his most obsequious appointees have fallen short.

 

“It’s certainly not about the willingness or the loyalty of any one person to carry out the president’s orders,” said Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor who is writing a book about the current state of the Justice Department.

 

“It’s more that there are limits on the president — courts, grand juries, lawyers and investigators who understand norms and ethics — that have started getting in his way.”

 

Over the past few months, those limits have become more visible as the legal system has pushed back in an extraordinary manner against the president’s attempts to investigate and prosecute his enemies, no matter how much — or rather, little — evidence exists to support the cases. Judges, grand juries and some federal prosecutors have stepped in to block Mr. Trump’s most egregious efforts, serving as a bulwark against his maximalist personal and political goals.

 

It remains unclear for now how long Mr. Blanche, 51, might stay in his new job as acting attorney general — or who is likely to replace him. One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described the job as Mr. Blanche’s to lose.

 

Several other names have been floated in recent days, including Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; Senator Mike Lee, Republican of Utah; and Senator Ashley Moody, Republican of Florida. But it is unclear how serious any of these candidates might be, given Mr. Trump’s habit of musing with his associates about potential personnel moves.

 

Some of Mr. Trump’s Republican allies seem to believe that all he needs to do is appoint a more belligerent attorney general to force through what Ms. Bondi failed to accomplish.

 

“We want to see heads roll,” Representative Chip Roy of Texas said on Friday morning on Fox News, adding, “The next attorney general needs to be very aggressive.”

 

Moreover, some of Mr. Trump’s supporters on the right have renewed their effort to portray Mr. Blanche — the architect of the president’s scorched-earth legal strategy — as trying to quietly sidetrack investigations demanded by the Trump base.

 

Ms. Bondi tried to redirect some of the president’s anger by blaming local federal prosecutors who have, in several important cases, declined to quickly indict those he had singled out as criminals.

 

At a reception for U.S. attorneys last December, Mr. Trump berated the top federal prosecutor in Maryland, Kelly O. Hayes, for not indicting Senator Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California and an outspoken critic, for mortgage fraud, as Ms. Bondi and stunned officials looked on, according to a person who attended the event.

 

Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche got the president’s message, stepping up efforts to investigate several other Trump targets, including the Democratic fund-raising group ActBlue; John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director; and Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to two officials briefed on the effort.

 

But more aggression in the courts is unlikely to solve the problem that Mr. Trump and his supporters are actually facing: that the cases he has asked for — and the people he has chosen to go after — are not, on the basis of the facts and law, targets for viable prosecution.

 

Mr. Blanche, who represented Mr. Trump in three of the four criminal cases he faced while out of office, at least comes to the job of leading the department with an advantage that Ms. Bondi and most of the other candidates never had: strong ties to the president forged during their shared time in the courtroom. The cases drew the men together in a bond based on a mutual feeling that Mr. Trump had been wronged by the Justice Department during the Biden administration.

 

Still, even Mr. Blanche, who has often claimed to have witnessed firsthand how the law was “weaponized” against the president, may not be able to deliver in the end on Mr. Trump’s desire to go after those he believes went after him.

 

Under Mr. Blanche, the Justice Department has already failed to win cases against two of Mr. Trump’s most reviled adversaries, the former F.B.I. director James B. Comey and the New York attorney general, Letitia James. Those cases died in November when a federal judge determined that Lindsey Halligan, the inexperienced loyalist who was handpicked by the president to bring charges, was put into her job unlawfully.

 

The department also failed on Mr. Blanche’s watch to secure an indictment against six Democratic lawmakers who made a video last year reminding military and intelligence personnel of their obligations to disobey illegal orders. Around the same time, prosecutors were unable to move forward with making a case against former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and aides over allegations that they had broken the law by using the autopen to sign presidential documents

 

In yet another unusual move, Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief federal judge in Washington, threw a significant roadblock last month into an investigation into Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, over claims that there were overruns in the central bank’s renovations of its headquarters. Judge Boasberg determined that prosecutors had issued subpoenas to the Fed for no other reason than to harass Mr. Powell, who had long run afoul of Mr. Trump for not dropping interest rates, more or less at the president’s request.

 

Despite the renewed bid by Ms. Bondi and Mr. Blanche to move against targets of Mr. Trump like Mr. Brennan and Ms. Hutchinson, there is no guarantee that those investigations will fare any better in the courts than previous inquiries have. Pushing forward with them might actually leave Mr. Blanche or his successor in the lurch.

 

Neither, after all, is a slam-dunk case, and both would most likely have to proceed in Federal District Court in Washington. Since last year, grand juries there have repeatedly refused to return indictments against Mr. Trump’s adversaries and others caught up in some of his signature policies, including his surge of National Guard members and federal agents onto the city’s streets.

 

Before Mr. Trump began demanding that the Justice Department file cases against his enemies, grand juries rarely rejected efforts to secure indictments and prosecutors could go through long careers without experiencing the embarrassment of failing to get charges.

 

But under Mr. Trump, such failures have become more common — so common, in fact, that last month Judge Boasberg issued a remarkable standing order directing grand jury forepersons to alert the court if they rejected an indictment in what is known as a no true bill.

 

Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump.

 

Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.