Todd Blanche Targets Trump's Enemies Amid Jockeying to Lead Justice Dept.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/24/us/politics/todd-blanche-trump-doj.html

https://archive.ph/uRnFu

Todd Blanche Targets Trump’s Enemies Amid Jockeying to Lead Justice Dept.
Mr. Blanche’s actions are meant to demonstrate progress on the president’s priorities, chief among them payback.
By Glenn Thrush, Alan Feuer and Kenneth P. Vogel
April 24, 2026

Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, is doing what he can, as quickly as he can, to shed the “acting” label.

At Mr. Blanche’s urging, the Justice Department is moving ahead with investigations into several high-profile targets — including John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director who helped investigate Russian interference in Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.

Beyond Mr. Brennan, current and former officials say, Mr. Blanche has also given the green light to inquiries into Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who outraged Mr. Trump four years ago after she implicated him in the violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; the Democratic fund-raising organization ActBlue over documented discrepancies in its screening of overseas donors; and the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit in Alabama that was indicted this week over a discontinued program that paid informants to infiltrate white supremacist and extremist groups.

Moreover, prosecutors plan to revive a botched attempt to bring charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, after a federal judge threw out charges last year that Mr. Comey had lied to Congress, the people said. It is not clear what they are investigating this time.

And they are soon expected to subpoena bodyguards who protected Fani Willis, the state prosecutor who brought criminal charges against Mr. Trump in Georgia, possibly in connection with an investigation into her government-funded travel, one of the people said.

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