The Justice Department Is a Glorified Pro-Trump Law Firm Now

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

Earlier this week, Todd Blanche was sworn in as the newest attorney general of the United States. Administering the oath of office to Blanche, who previously served as President Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, was another former member of Trump’s legal team: Judge Emil Bove, whom Trump nominated in 2025 to a life-tenured seat on the Third Circuit. 

For both Blanche and Bove, the reunion must have been a real treat. Three years ago, they were unknown New York City-area law firm partners taking a long-shot bet on a disgraced ex-president who stood accused of, among other things, sexually assaulting a magazine writer, storing classified government documents in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, making illegal hush money payments to kill an unflattering news story about his philandering, and trying to fraudulently overturn his loss in the 2020 election in Georgia. (That last list item should not be confused with separate federal charges stemming from Trump’s involvement in efforts to foment a violent insurrection and overthrow the government on January 6.)

Thanks in part to the work of Blanche and Bove, though, none of those cases resulted in meaningful consequences for Trump. And now that he is president again, their respective appointments are best understood as hard-earned rewards for their troubles. After Bove finished conducting Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony Monday, the two former colleagues got to hug it out in the Oval Office as their bored-looking benefactor clapped politely.

Blanche is the latest in a long line of former Trump lawyers whose primary qualification for their current jobs is their prior service on his legal team(s). In his new role, Blanche will work alongside Harmeet Dhillon, now the assistant attorney general for civil rights, and previously a Trump campaign adviser who in 2020 called on the Supreme Court to “step in and do something” about his election loss. For legal advice, Blanche will rely heavily on T. Elliot Gaiser, now the assistant attorney general at the Office of Legal Counsel, and previously a key member of the right-wing brain trust that tried to overturn the 2020 election on Trump’s behalf.

There are many, many more. Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, helped defend Trump during his first impeachment trial in the Senate. John Sauer, who argued in Trump v. United States that the Constitution entitles presidents to sweeping immunity for crimes committed while in office, is now Trump’s solicitor general. David Warrington, the outgoing White House counsel, represented Trump when he was subpoenaed by the House Select Committee on January 6. Will Scharf, Warrington’s replacement, was on Sauer’s team in the immunity case.

If you are keeping track at home, the common thread among the person who is in charge of civil federal rights enforcement, the person who writes formal legal opinions for the executive branch, the person who argues the Trump administration’s positions at the Supreme Court, the person who provides Trump with legal advice, and now the person who runs the entire Justice Department is a track record of working to keep Trump in power, out of prison, or some combination thereof. None of these people give a shit about the law, in any meaningful sense. They only care about helping their favorite client flout it.

Ex-Trump lawyers who preferred seats on the federal bench to prestigious gigs in the executive branch have had no trouble getting what they wanted, either. Justin Smith, who worked on the immunity case, was confirmed to the Eighth Circuit in June. Matthew Schwartz, who handled the hush money prosecution in New York, now sits on the Second Circuit. Bove got the best of both worlds: His Third Circuit nomination followed a whirlwind four-month tour at the Justice Department, where he distinguished himself by encouraging his colleagues to say “fuck you” to judges who issued orders that he did not think Trump would like.

Even fringe members of Trump’s legal teams have been repaid with plum jobs as federal prosecutors that, in any other universe, they would never have been considered for. Alina Habba was working at a small New Jersey firm when Trump brought her on in 2021; in 2025, Trump appointed her as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey. Before working for Trump, Lindsey Halligan practiced insurance law in Florida. After his re-election, she, too, got to spend a few weeks cosplaying as a federal prosecutor before annoyed federal judges—yes, more than one—basically ordered her to get out of their courtrooms and never return. To give you a sense of the caliber of legal professional we are talking about here, both Habba and Halligan apparently made Trump’s acquaintance on the golf course. 

You do not have to look very hard to see the consequences of a government run by lawyers who still understand their job to be looking out for Trump’s interests. Just this year, the Justice Department has tried to subpoena New York Times journalists who reported a story about Air Force One that made the president feel embarrassed and upset. It has defended Trump’s beloved East Wing ballroom project in court filings that read suspiciously like lightly edited Truth Social posts. It has even reportedly considered opening a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the writer who accused him of sexual assault, because there is nothing Trump and his lawyers would enjoy more than using the full power of the federal government to exact revenge on an 82-year-old woman who beat them in court, twice.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of the Justice Department’s transformation into a glorified pro-Trump law firm came last month, after 67-year-old David Hearn had the temerity to touch the peeling liner that Trump installed in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool at taxpayer expense. Jeanine Pirro, the longtime Fox News personality whom Trump appointed as the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., publicly accused Hearn of vandalism and filed felony charges against him. Several weeks later, she dropped the charges and conceded that the real culprit was a “botched installation” of the pool liner carried out by a contractor Trump selected himself.

For Trump, who has repeatedly blamed phantom saboteurs for the liner’s hilarious disintegration into cobalt-blue chunks, Pirro’s choice was an unconscionable act of insubordination. These days, though, getting his way can be as simple as leaning on a more ethically flexible person with a DOJ email address. Sure enough, according to The Wall Street Journal, after the White House complained about Pirro’s decision to the Justice Department, officials there obediently began exploring the possibility of reopening the case.

It is of course true that presidents often fill high-profile roles with lawyers with whom they are familiar. But what differentiates conventional presidential appointees from Trump’s second-term lawyers are the circumstances in which he discovered, retained, and promoted them. He did not hire these people for their legal acumen, or because their résumés demonstrated any sort of sincere interest in public service. He hired them because they made clear their willingness to say and do anything for power and personal gain. Putting Blanche types in charge of the government is how ostensibly representative democracies transform into competitive authoritarian states: A president who has made clear his desire to dismantle the constitutional order is handing out important jobs to sycophants who he knows will let him do it. 

Over the course of the decades he’s spent in public life, Trump has never been especially complicated to figure out: He loves people who are loyal to him, and hates everyone else. For a certain tranche of Republican lawyers whose lofty ambitions outpace their middling talents, his rise to power presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: If they defended him when the stakes were highest, he would reward them handsomely at his earliest opportunity. 

Blanche and Bove and the rest have different titles than they did five years ago. But they are all still working for the same guy. They wouldn’t be where they are if they weren’t.