Todd Blanche’s New Grip on the Federal Prison System
Critics worry a little-noticed policy shift could let the attorney general reward allies, punish enemies, and sideline longstanding Bureau of Prisons processes.
ACTING ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE was grilled during his confirmation hearing over the controversial transfer of convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell to a lower-security prison last year—a move that took place just one week after Blanche met with Maxwell to discuss her associations with Jeffrey Epstein.
In a heated exchange with Blanche, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) argued the transfer “seems clearly like a reward” after Maxwell appeared to distance President Donald Trump from Epstein’s criminal activities during her interview with the then-deputy attorney general.
Booker had reason to pound this point.
At her new facility—dubbed “Club Fed”—Maxwell reportedly has a service puppy, specialized workout hours, and customized meals delivered directly to her housing unit. She is also the only one of more than 20,000 current federal sex offenders to have been approved for placement in such a federal minimum-security prison camp, according to Maureen Baird and Janet Perdue, former senior Bureau of Prisons officials with sixty-two years’ combined experience (who now run the firm Baird Perdue & Associates Prison Consultants).
Several of the lawmakers and experts whom I spoke to for this article believe Maxwell’s move was a top-down directive from Department of Justice leadership rather than a bottom-up Bureau of Prisons decision. “Todd Blanche had just interviewed Maxwell for several hours before this transfer occurred, so it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to connect the dots,” Rep. Deborah Ross (D-N.C.) told me. Even so, she acknowledged that no evidence has emerged—including during his confirmation hearings—that Blanche personally directed Maxwell’s transfer.
Some critics say Blanche’s own description of his role only heightens concerns that he was inappropriately involved in Maxwell’s transfer. Asked about Maxwell during a December appearance on Meet the Press, Blanche said that he is “responsible for the Bureau of Prisons” and that “every decision” made by the BOP “lands on my desk to the extent it needs to.”
But certain experts and members of Congress say Maxwell’s transfer is just the tip of the iceberg: the most visible example of a broader policy change that centralizes—and, in some cases, politicizes—federal prison placement authority under the attorney general. They warn that the policy could be used not only to reward allies of the administration, as they argue happened with Maxwell, but also potentially to punish its perceived enemies. And given the Justice Department’s recent record investigating political adversaries, they say the policy deserves a hard look. Here’s why.
The Bureau of Prisons, a component of the Justice Department, has traditionally handled prison placement decisions. It has a 116-page manual of guidelines detailing the degree of supervision different prisoners require.
As Booker observed in Blanche’s hearing two weeks ago, BOP regulations generally prohibit housing convicted sex offenders like Maxwell in minimum-security facilities. Baird, who helped develop BOP’s prison classification policies in the 1990s, told me these standards were set precisely to ensure “an individual convicted of a sex crime was housed in at least a low-security prison and never at a minimum-security prison camp” because “sex offenders pose a risk to the community.”
A BOP spokesperson disputed that a transfer of this kind is unprecedented but could not provide statistics or examples to support the claim.
At his confirmation hearing, Blanche said Maxwell was moved because of concerns about her physical safety in prison. Booker responded that, if safety were truly the issue, BOP’s standard response would be to send her to protective custody or another low-security prison—not to reassign her to a minimum-security camp.
On June 17, BOP tweeted a public statement claiming that the decision to transfer Maxwell had been made “independently by BOP,” with “no preference, special treatment, or political influence” playing any role. A BOP spokesperson told me the transfer was based on the “general observation” that lower-security prisons have fewer violent incidents but could not identify any specific security measures making her new prison safer.
DEMOCRATS AND LEGAL OBSERVERS unconvinced of the BOP’s independence point to a May 6 BOP policy change, quietly issued under Blanche’s supervision as acting attorney general, that they say gives the attorney general carte blanche over federal prison placement. They contend that, by allowing the attorney general (in unspecified circumstances) to designate an inmate’s place of imprisonment, the policy shifts prison placement authority from the BOP’s traditional role and established processes.1 The policy change was made with no public announcement.2
The revision also lets the BOP facilitate communication between prisoners and the Office of the Attorney General. Rep. Raskin (D-Md.) told me in a phone interview this specific provision appears both backward- and forward-looking—as if it were designed to retroactively “normalize the extraordinary nature of Blanche’s contact with Ghislaine Maxwell” while simultaneously enabling BOP to facilitate similar interactions between future attorneys general and federal prisoners.
But to Raskin, the policy’s real stakes are a larger institutional usurpation. “Maxwell is just a small window into the kind of total power the president wants to exercise over the penal system,” he said.
Raskin joined Rep. Ross and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) in a June letter to the BOP director arguing that the policy change marked “a significant departure” from its longstanding inmate classification framework. “They cannot explain how this improves the process other than to give the attorney general, and therefore the president, the power to favor their friends or harm their enemies,” Raskin told me.
Raskin was just one of several experts and lawmakers I spoke to who worried that as a result of these changes, a well-connected prisoner could receive more favorable prison placement—such as a camp or halfway house—while one of the president’s perceived adversaries could face harsher confinement than career BOP officials would otherwise recommend.
“The change that was made here is just absolutely stunning in scope and potential impact,” former Justice Department pardon attorney Liz Oyer told me. Oyer, who testified against Blanche and first broke the news of the policy shift, said it “essentially gives the attorney general the authority to override the entire manual at his complete discretion.”
NOTABLY, CONGRESS MANDATES that BOP show “no favoritism” toward prisoners of “high social or economic status” when making transfer decisions—a legal requirement that the DOJ must follow.3
When I asked BOP how the attorney general would comply with that requirement, a spokesperson offered no explanation, instead responding with a rationale for the policy change. It made no mention of Maxwell.
The spokesperson said the revision was intended to “formally memorialize” the attorney general’s statutory authority over prison placement in light of ongoing litigation regarding the redesignation of federal inmates whose death sentences were commuted by President Joe Biden.
That litigation began after Trump issued a day-one executive order, modeled on a Project 2025 recommendation, directing the attorney general to move many of Biden’s death-row commutations to more restrictive prisons. Some legal critics argued that Trump implemented the executive order specifically to diminish the practical effect of Biden’s clemency.
To Mark Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law and an expert in clemency, the fact that Blanche is using this authority to fulfill a specific Trump directive only adds to the concerns about favoritism. “The transfer of commuted death row prisoners was clearly for political reasons,” he said.
Rep. Ross echoed that view: BOP’s explanation “only reinforces why this policy raises serious concerns.” She also noted that, because the policy doesn’t spell out whether the attorney general can take into account politics or instructions from the White House, it would “allow the attorney general to move inmates to either higher- or lower-security facilities without any clear standards or safeguards against political favoritism or abuse.”
Mark Allenbaugh, a former staff attorney for the Sentencing Commission, said that the BOP’s recent planned closure of six lower-security prisons raises the stakes. With fewer lower-security beds, inmates who would otherwise qualify for them—including former national security advisor and Trump critic John Bolton, Allenbaugh said—are increasingly likely to end up in higher-security institutions.
Allenbaugh also told me the change has the potential to affect not just where prisoners are held but the practical length of their sentences, since access to earned-time credits depends heavily on recidivism programs available at a particular prison. Because those programs vary widely by institution, some inmates have far less practical access than others. “The attorney general could absolutely effectively extend the time an inmate would otherwise serve,” he said.4
WHATEVER ITS PRACTICAL IMPACT may ultimately be, the BOP policy is already drawing scrutiny in Blanche’s confirmation process. In a series of written questions, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked Blanche about why the policy change was made and how he plans to use his prison placement power.
In his written responses, Blanche left several key questions unresolved. While he said he would not wield the authority for political purposes, he did not describe any measures he would take to prevent favoritism. And in response to Durbin’s question about why the policy had been changed, Blanche did not mention the ongoing litigation over the death-row prisoners—the justification given to me by the BOP spokesperson. Instead, he said only that “decisions of this kind are made based on legitimate considerations, including safety and security.”
His answers aren’t enough for some lawmakers. “If this change was simply meant to reflect existing authority, why was it adopted more than a year after the Trump administration began exercising that authority and only after it was facing litigation and intense public scrutiny over Ghislaine Maxwell’s transfer to a lower security facility?” Rep. Ross demanded.
The BOP spokesperson did not respond to my request to identify whether or how the attorney general’s designation authority has been used so far, and the Justice Department denied my request for expedited processing of a FOIA request seeking records about Maxwell’s transfer and the policy change’s implementation.5 A BOP spokesperson did confirm that under the revised policy, future placement decisions—including whether to house convicted sex offenders in minimum-security prison camps—will be made on a “case-by-case basis.”
These responses, according to the lawmakers I spoke with, only strengthen the need for congressional action. Ross said she would consider legislation restoring exclusive prison placement authority to the BOP. “All options are on the table,” she noted.
For Raskin, this issue extends beyond Maxwell’s case or Blanche’s confirmation or even the Trump administration. “The moment that political favoritism governs the conditions of confinement, then everyone immediately tries to curry favor with the people in power,” Raskin said. “It’s a return to monarchical and feudal relationships, where it’s all about the fury or the mercy of the king. . . . That’s what confinement is like in authoritarian societies.”
The policy also strikes out language requiring that the attorney general follow BOP’s longstanding inmate classification system, a change Baird called “perplexing” given that it had been used for decades.
Ron Levin, an administrative law expert at the Washington University School of Law, said the notice appears to be a procedural rule that simply shifts decision-making authority to the attorney general, rather than creating a new prison placement policy—meaning it did not have to go through the public notice-and-comment process. Long story short, the Justice Department likely was not required to publicly propose or justify the change notice before adopting it.
Former Sentencing Commission staff attorney Mark Allenbaugh added that, in practice, the mandate has always been “impossible to enforce.”
Not everyone I spoke with shared Allenbaugh’s concern. Mark Osler, the University of St. Thomas law professor, agrees that placement can affect time served but considers it highly improbable that an attorney general would wield this placement authority vindictively to alter a prisoner’s period of incarceration.
The Bureau of Prisons, however, did approve my expedited FOIA request related to the change notice’s implementation.
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