MAGA Turns on Trump’s Top Lawyer
Todd Blanche discovers that your place is never totally secure in the modern conservative movement.
Todd Blanche faces MAGA heat
It’s hard to imagine a more loyal Trump foot soldier than Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. A former defense attorney for Trump, Blanche has played a role in administration controversies big and small. At one point, Trump even appointed him to run the Library of Congress. (It’s still not totally clear who is running it right now.)
Most infamously, Blanche conducted a friendly interview with imprisoned sex trafficker, sex abuser, and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell just before she was suspiciously transferred to a lower-security prison.
And yet, as is often the case in MAGA land, it’s never enough.
Blanche has become the target of a right-wing media campaign pushing for his ouster. His accusers blame him for, among other things, holding up a Maxwell-like arrangement for Tina Peters, a conspiracy theorist and former county clerk in Colorado sentenced last fall to nine years in prison for letting another conspiracy theorist copy hard drives of voter data and post the stolen materials to his website. And in an administration that takes many of its cues from right-wing media, that might spell trouble for even entrenched Trump loyalists like Blanche.
“We now can definitely identify Todd Blanche as the problem,” Emerald Robinson, an anchor for MyPillow magnate Mike Lindell’s LindellTV, said in an InfoWars appearance last week.
No one’s position inside the MAGA movement is ever fully secure. And that holds particularly true for those who serve in Trump’s Justice Department, where each month a new top official seems to be in the crosshairs of activists yearning for prosecutions, accountability or just good old-fashioned liberal tears. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, both at the FBI, have had to manage disappointment and anger over the lack of disclosures around the Jeffrey Epstein files. And Attorney General Pam Bondi recently was the subject of intense criticism for claiming that hate speech wasn’t legally protected.
Blanche, by contrast, had largely skated. Until now.
He has recently been blamed for a host of misdeeds, including holding up “reparations” for January 6th defendants. But the most significant allegation against him comes from Peter Ticktin, a former Trump military-academy chum turned MAGA lawyer who’s now at the center of the get-Blanche campaign.
In Ticktin’s telling, the Justice Department was poised last month to essentially rescue his client Peters from Colorado state prison, where she has started serving her nine-year sentence.
Peters has become a kind of election fraud martyr, thanks in part to interviews from prison where she lays out grievances with prison life, including smelly cups, loud doors slamming, and guards yelling her name too loudly. But because Peters is held on state charges, Trump can’t pardon her, even though he’s demanded her release repeatedly in Truth Social posts.
Ticktin claims the Justice Department was poised to transfer Peters in September to a cozier federal prison. But, in an appearance last week on former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s show, Ticktin alleged that the plan was quashed by Blanche.
“Who’s holding it up on our side?” Bannon asked.
“Todd Blanche!” Ticktin said.
Peters has kept up the pressure herself, issuing a statement on X demanding that the DOJ “send in the marshals” to rescue her.
“Why is the DOJ defying Trump’s demands?” she tweeted. “Get off your asses and get me out!”
Ticktin and the Justice Department didn’t respond to requests for comment.
What kind of rinky-dink scheme could have saved Peters?
According to Overstock.com founder Patrick Byrne—an election denier and Peters friend whom Ticktin is attempting (so far unsuccessfully) to represent in an unrelated trial—the plan was for the Justice Department to claim that Peters is a “witness” in an unspecified upcoming case. That, in turn, would create a need for her to be in federal custody. Then Peters would have been transferred to a nicer, camp-style prison.
It all could have worked out, allegedly, had Blanche not intervened!
“Todd Blanche put the kibosh on that,” Byrne said in an appearance on Robinson’s LindellTV show. “Todd Blanche is just a menace.”
Byrne added that Blanche was “blocking everything [Trump] says he wants done” at the Justice Department—a serious accusation in Trump world, where it is held as an article of faith that Deep State actors in the security agencies and DOJ scuttled the president during his first term.
The call to fire Blanche has been picked up by other MAGA influencers, including the popular “Hodge Twins” and InfoWars chief Alex Jones. Happy to pile on, Jones claimed that Blanche had also blocked an investigation into alleged unfairness in the Sandy Hook lawsuits that bankrupted InfoWars.
“You think you got that killed, think again,” Jones said on his show last week, addressing the deep state. “You wait till your little deputy AG’s—” Jones then snapped his fingers and made a whistling noise to suggest Blanche would soon be gone.
Blanche’s Maxwell deposition gambit and other displays of loyalty have no doubt built up a reserve of loyalty on Trump’s part. But Trump has also posted a lot about Tina Peters. And far more modest social media campaigns have gotten other people canned in this administration. Consider the many heads lopped off by Laura Loomer, or how a post from right-wing journalist Julie Kelly apparently prompted the firing of a senior federal prosecutor in Virginia last week.
Perhaps that’s why the Fire Blanche campaign has received so much pushback from top Justice Department officials and other MAGA figures. On Friday, Chad Mizelle—the chief of staff to attorney general Pam Bondi—defended Blanche on X.
“Todd Blanche is crushing the deep state,” he wrote.
Former congressman Matt Gaetz, now a host at One America News, argued that Blanche was “no squish.” But perhaps the strongest defense of Blanche came from former Trump lawyer Alina Habba, now fighting her own battle to remain as the lead federal prosecutor in New Jersey.
Blanche “is one of the GOATs,” Habba tweeted, using the popular acronym for “Greatest of All Time.”
How can Tina Peters be tweeting from prison? Shouldn’t she be doing laundry or something?
There are just too many unhinged magats trying to ruin the country...Peters is right where she needs to be...in prison enjoying the fruits of her labor....