Over 1,200 former employees at the Department of Justice are urging the Senate Committee on the Judiciary to reject President Donald Trump’s nomination of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche as full-time attorney general.
The plea comes just over a week before Blanche is set to appear before the Senate for his confirmation hearing.
The letter, signed by hundreds of DOJ alumni, accuses Blanche of “demonizing career employees, undermining their work, and driving them out of the department” since he joined the Trump administration last year.
“In the coming weeks, many will rightly underscore the corruption and abuses that have defined the Justice Department under Todd Blanche’s leadership: the vindictive prosecutions and investigations of the President’s foes; the deals designed to reward lawbreakers with taxpayer dollars; the erasure of accountability for January 6; the mishandling of the Epstein files; and the denigration of judges and repeated violations of their orders,” the former employees said in a letter shared by Justice Connection on Tuesday.
“But we want to focus on an area that deserves just as much attention: Todd Blanche’s degradation of DOJ’s apolitical career workforce,” they added.
The letter goes on to say that 16,000 of the department’s 100,000-employee workforce have left under Blanche’s leadership.
“Others resigned rather than follow illegal or unethical orders, or they left because they feared those orders would come,” the letter reads.
The anti-Blanche contingent also points to the DOJ’s recruiting struggles as an example of how far the department has fallen in the past year. The group says the DOJ is using “desperate measures” to retain its employees by “lowering hiring requirements for prosecutors and FBI agents, and offering signing bonuses and financial incentives for employees to stay.”
Blanche previously served as deputy attorney general until President Donald Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general in April. Trump later announced Blanche was his next pick for the top DOJ position.
Blanche represented Trump in multiple high-profile criminal cases, including the New York hush money trial that resulted in a conviction, before Trump became president again.
The acting attorney general will face the Senate judiciary committee on July 15, while outside witnesses will testify on his nomination the following day.
Justice Connection, a nonprofit network of DOJ alumni, sent the letter directly to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and Dick Durbin (D-IL), the top leaders on the congressional panel.
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Among the more than 1,200 employees who have spoken out against Blanche’s nomination are former assistant U.S. attorneys, trial attorneys, FBI special agents, and investigators. One of the most notable names attached to the 59-page letter is JP Cooney, a former top deputy to special counsel Jack Smith and a former Democratic congressional candidate. Smith unsuccessfully prosecuted Trump in two federal cases.
“We served the public at the Department of Justice as career employees and appointees during both Republican and Democratic administrations,” the DOJ alumni wrote. “Regardless of how we joined the department, every one of us took an oath to support and defend the Constitution, not the occupant of the White House.”