Todd Blanche refuses to pledge independence from Trump as attorney general
The new head of the Justice Department said that the president had never asked him to prosecute specific people, and never would.
The newly confirmed US attorney general, Todd Blanche, has refused to say he would always act independently of the White House and Donald Trump.
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“No, I’m not going to pledge that,” he said during an interview on Sunday. “And no attorney general should ever pledge that," he added.
Mr Blanche also said that Mr Trump has “never” demanded he prosecute specific people, despite his predecessor, Pam Bondi, being dismissed over insufficient action against Trump’s political enemies.
“The president will never ask me to do something unethical or legal or illegal,” Mr Blanche told NBC host Kristen Welker.
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“He never has. He never will. And no, I have – I swore to the Constitution of the United States, like every cabinet secretary has done, and like every attorney general before me has done.
“And so, this narrative that’s mostly pushed by the left and pushed by the media that the president’s going to pull me aside and ask me to do something illegal is completely a false narrative, not true, will not happen and hasn’t happened.”
He also claimed that reports of White House meddling in the department were overhyped.
“There is this extraordinarily false narrative that the president wakes up in the morning and calls me and says, ‘Todd, go prosecute X or Y,’” Mr Blanche said. “He does not do that”.
His comments on Sunday came days after he narrowly won a vote in the US Senate to succeed Ms Bondi, with all Democrats voting against him.
Blanche previously served as Trump’s criminal defence lawyer when he was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in connection with payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels.
In December, he also defended the move of Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum-security prison.
In another interview, he said that he was not afraid to push back against Donald Trump. “It’s my job to talk to him about those issues, which I have done for many years and I will continue to do,” he said on 'Fox News Sunday'.
On Friday, Mr Blanche appeared alongside the president at an event in Long Island with Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive running for governor of New York.
“In my Department of Justice, if anybody touches a federal law enforcement officer in any way inappropriate, we will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law,” Mr Blanche said at the event.
When Ms Welker asked him to align that statement with Mr Trump’s clemency to the Capitol rioters on the first day of his second term, Mr Blanche said: Presidents have the constitutional right to pardon anyone they want.
Mr Blanche highlighted his commitment to law and order during a speech at Justice Department headquarters last week. Mr Trump, he told Fox News, “wants law enforcement out there arresting bad guys”.