President Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on Thursday, and Mr. Blanche, her deputy, will serve as acting attorney general, according to a person familiar with the decision, the New York Times reported.
Mr. Blanche, 51, currently serves as the No. 2 official at the Justice Department. While the deputy attorney general is the department’s second-in-command, there is no automatic succession to the top job — a new attorney general must be nominated and confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Blanche’s “acting” designation means he steps into the role on a temporary basis while the administration determines its next move.
In a Truth Social post announcing the change, Mr. Trump praised Ms. Bondi as “a Great American Patriot and a loyal friend” and said she “will be transitioning to a much needed and important new job in the private sector.” He described Mr. Blanche as “a very talented and respected Legal Mind” who would step in as acting attorney general. Multiple outlets reported Thursday that Mr. Trump had grown frustrated with Ms. Bondi over the pace of prosecutions against his political opponents and her handling of the Justice Department’s release of files from its investigation into deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
From SDNY prosecutor to Trump’s lawyer
Mr. Blanche was born in Denver, Colorado, and built his early legal career as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, where he spent more than 15 years handling violent crimes and gang prosecutions. He later became a partner at two prominent law firms before eventually entering private practice as a criminal defense attorney.
It was in that capacity that Mr. Blanche became one of the most recognizable lawyers in the country — as Donald Trump’s lead defense attorney. He represented Mr. Trump in three of the four criminal cases brought against the former president between 2023 and 2024, including the Manhattan hush money trial that ended in a conviction on 34 felony counts, the federal classified documents case in Florida, and the federal election interference prosecution brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
SEE ALSO: Trump ousts Attorney General Pam Bondi
The effort came at professional cost: Mr. Blanche resigned from Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, writing in an internal email that representing Mr. Trump “was not an option” while remaining at the firm. According to The New York Times, the firm’s reputational committee had also pushed back on his decision to take on the former president as a client.
Confirmed as deputy attorney general
Following Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, Mr. Blanche was nominated as deputy attorney general in November 2024. He appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Feb. 12, 2025, where he defended his record and said he was confident Mr. Trump would not ask him to do anything “illegal or immoral.” The full Senate confirmed him on March 5, 2025, in a 52–46 vote largely along party lines.
In his role as deputy, Mr. Blanche oversaw the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department’s 115,000 employees, including the FBI, DEA, U.S. Marshals Service, ATF and all 93 U.S. attorney’s offices.
A complicated profile at DOJ
Mr. Blanche’s tenure as deputy attorney general was not without controversy. Some of Ms. Bondi’s allies privately suggested that Mr. Blanche, not Ms. Bondi, had been the primary brake on aggressive prosecutions of Mr. Trump’s political opponents — reportedly out of concern for his own professional future. Mr. Blanche pushed back on that characterization last week, telling NewsNation: “What’s happening now is Democrats in Congress and some senators and a few Republicans … are making this their entire existence. That’s not MAGA.”
He also drew scrutiny for his handling of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Epstein files. Mr. Blanche personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell — who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping Mr. Epstein abuse underage girls — over two days in July 2025. The Justice Department later released the full transcript of that interview. Legal observers questioned the propriety of such a senior official conducting the interview directly, given Mr. Blanche’s prior relationship with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Blanche also terminated Liz Oyer, the Justice Department’s pardon attorney, in March 2025. Ms. Oyer said publicly that she was fired the day after refusing to recommend that actor Mel Gibson — a Trump supporter who lost his gun rights following a 2011 domestic violence misdemeanor conviction — have those rights restored. A senior official in Mr. Blanche’s office had pressed her to reconsider, citing Mr. Gibson’s personal relationship with the president, she said. Mr. Blanche denied her account, calling it “false.”
Mr. Blanche also floated a proposal to merge the Drug Enforcement Administration into the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives — one of the most significant proposed restructurings of federal law enforcement since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The plan drew pushback from both gun-rights and gun-control groups and was quietly shelved by early 2026.
As acting attorney general, Mr. Blanche now leads the Justice Department while Mr. Trump decides on a permanent replacement. His trajectory — from personal lawyer to the nation’s top law enforcement officer — remains one of the more unusual in modern Justice Department history.
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