Once Blanche was Seen As Tempering Trump Behavior, Now He Drank the Kool-Aide and He is All In
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, during a cabinet meeting at the White House in May.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times By Glenn Thrush Reporting from Washington New York Times When he was the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Todd Blanche ejected his subordinate Ed Martin, then the leader of the agency’s “anti-weaponization” task force, from offices on the fourth floor at headquarters to a satellite site an 18-minute Uber ride across town. Mr. Blanche had long complained that Mr. Martin, whose demands for retribution tracked closely with President Trump’s own calls for vengeance, spent too much of his time taunting his targets, and too little time knuckling down to conduct effective investigations, Mr. Blanche told people in his orbit when he made the move in February. Many people inside the department, and even some critics of Mr. Blanche on the outside, viewed the Martin episode as a modest victory for normalcy. It seemed to feed into a narr...
