President-elect Donald Trump’s staunchest personal legal defenders are set to transform into his Department of Justice leadership team and will, if confirmed, face their toughest loyalty test yet as they aim to fulfill Trump’s federal law enforcement visions.
Trump’s personal lawyers will fill three of the most powerful positions at the DOJ, while former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who defended Trump during his first impeachment, will helm the department as attorney general. Some legal experts say Trump’s gravitation toward loyalists could serve him well, while others have raised caution flags over it.
Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard Law School professor emeritus who defended Trump during his first impeachment alongside Bondi, told the Washington Examiner he thought Trump’s choices were sensible and that the president-elect “likes to test people.”
“It’s not surprising to me that he wants to pick people who have proven themselves to be successful advocates,” Dershowitz said. “Look, I think all presidents want to have trusted people in the Justice Department.”
However, Dershowitz also indicated that Trump’s onetime defenders will have a different relationship with the president-elect when placed in their government roles. Similar to how Trump’s former attorneys general, Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions, fell out of favor with Trump after the pair each challenged his demands, Bondi or the others could meet similar fates.
“The job of Attorney General is impossible because it merges both a political job requiring loyalty with a prosecutorial job requiring complete objectivity, and no human being is capable of doing that,” Dershowitz said.
Trump’s aggressive law enforcement plans include deporting millions of illegal immigrants and quashing national diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. But Trump’s DOJ will also run the president-elect’s revenge tour, which will involve targeting the DOJ officials who investigated and prosecuted Trump, pardoning what Trump has described as a “large portion” of Jan. 6 defendants, and digging up any evidence of fraud from the 2020 election, which Trump continues to falsely claim he won.
Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, whom Trump named as the No. 2 and No. 3 leaders under Bondi at the DOJ, will be behind the scenes running that show and will face pressure to carry out the plans in a manner that can survive scrutiny from judges.
Blanche and Bove developed their bona fides by defending Trump in his criminal cases and were primarily involved in leading Trump’s legal team in New York.
Although Trump was convicted by a jury of falsifying business records in the New York case, the pair had plans to appeal the verdict. Trump’s win, however, expedited matters for them. Blanche and Bove recently saw Trump’s sentence canceled indefinitely because of the election victory, and they soon plan to argue that the case should be tossed out entirely in light of it.
Trump rewarded a third personal lawyer, former Missouri solicitor general John Sauer, with the prestigious role of U.S. solicitor general.
Sauer is famous in the legal world for his fast-talking oral arguments, and he successfully argued to the Supreme Court this year, on behalf of Trump, that presidents enjoy at least some immunity from criminal prosecution. However, Sauer also has his name attached to a brutal legal defeat. He helped add Missouri to Texas’s grand lawsuit arguing to the Supreme Court that four battleground states improperly changed their election laws in 2020, a move that the high court swiftly shot down as an unconvincing effort.
Conservative attorney Andy McCarthy recently pointed out in an op-ed that Trump’s lawyers have had to take on some “dubious positions” at times as part of the package deal for being Trump’s private attorneys. He said Blanche, for example, faltered when he tried to “deny the undeniable” regarding Trump’s alleged affair with porn star Stormy Daniels during the New York trial, which resulted in a guilty verdict.
Making legally weak arguments on Trump’s behalf would likely prove equally unsuccessful at the DOJ.
McCarthy also cautioned that the attorney-client relationship between Trump and Blanche, Bove, and Sauer could present conflicts of interest or, at the least, unnecessarily gift Democrats with fodder.
“These lawyers are going to be more vulnerable than other nominees to the Democrats’ familiar charge that a DOJ nominee will prioritize loyalty to the president over the Constitution,” he wrote.
And, if Trump faced criminal allegations during his time in office, his top DOJ officials might need to recuse themselves because they were his former defense lawyers.
McCarthy told the Washington Examiner that Bondi presented less of a concern on that front because her work defending Trump has not appeared to involve the “same breadth of legal retainers, attorney-client privileged communications, and the like” as the other three.
While not a private lawyer for Trump in the same capacity as the others, Bondi has a long track record of showing her support for the president-elect. Bondi was an outlier in Florida in 2016 when she endorsed Trump over her home-state senator, Marco Rubio (R-FL), and she rushed to Trump’s defense to argue to the public that he won Pennsylvania in 2020 despite results showing Trump lost. She served as a senior adviser to Trump’s impeachment defense team in 2019, temporarily leaving her lobbying firm, Ballard Partners, for the job.
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Last year, Bondi also previewed what she expected out of a Trump administration DOJ, and it synced up perfectly with Trump’s vow to target those involved in bringing criminal cases against him.
“The prosecutors will be prosecuted, the bad ones,” Bondi said. “The investigators will be investigated because the deep state, last term for President Trump, they were hiding in the shadows, but now they have a spotlight on them.”
