President Donald Trump‘s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said former Attorney General Merrick Garland failed to be transparent about his role in major investigations targeting Trump, pointing to several pieces of evidence showing Garland personally approved key steps in those investigations.
Speaking Tuesday on Hang Out with Sean Hannity from Fox News, Blanche said he had no issue with an attorney general signing off on significant investigative actions, including the FBI’s August 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate during President Joe Biden‘s administration.
“The problem isn’t that he signed off on it,” Blanche said. “The problem is that he didn’t own up to being involved in that investigation.”
Blanche’s comments came as he discussed findings that were previously released by outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, which he said originated from records uncovered by the Department of Justice and shared with her office. The documents showed that Garland personally approved the FBI’s August 2022 search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.
Blanche said he does not view Garland’s approval itself as improper, arguing that attorneys general should be involved in major investigative decisions. But he said, “What I do quibble with is the narrative for the past three years that Biden and Garland had a hands-off.”
While Garland said in August 2022 that he “personally approved the decision to seek a search warrant,” other senior Biden administration officials regularly feigned a largely hands-off role in Trump-related criminal investigations, despite the direct involvement by the then-attorney general and his subordinates, and notwithstanding the senior DOJ official who migrated to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office before the 34 felony count hush money indictment came against Trump in early 2023.
Blanche, who served as Trump’s defense attorney in both federal criminal cases and the New York hush money case, also revisited arguments made by the former president’s legal team. He noted that federal prosecutors and FBI agents were granted access to Mar-a-Lago before the search warrant was executed and that Trump complied with a request to add an extra lock to a storage room where records were kept.
“We put that in public filings,” Blanche said. “The president met with them. He said every, what can we do? We’re here to help. You can look anywhere you want to look.”
Blanche also argued that prosecutors struggled to directly tie Trump to the alleged retention of specific classified documents, claiming investigators could not establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump personally handled or retained particular records at issue in the case.
Last year, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley released a declassified FBI memorandum showing Garland also approved the opening of “Arctic Frost,” a 2022 FBI investigation that later evolved into former special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Trump.
The release of the memo, signed by former FBI Director Christopher Wray and endorsed by then-Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, marked the first public knowledge that the highest officials under Biden authorized a full FBI investigation based largely on public reporting and statements related to efforts to challenge the 2020 election results. The inquiry ultimately served as a foundation for Smith’s federal election case.
Blanche also revealed that DOJ officials discovered a room containing materials from the Arctic Frost investigation stored in burn bags. While burn bags are routinely used to destroy sensitive government documents, Blanche suggested the circumstances surrounding the discovery indicated someone may have intentionally preserved the records.
“It’s not the existence of a burn bag that I think is interesting,” Blanche said. “This one was in a place where I get the point that an honorable FBI agent might have left it there … but it looked almost intentional.”
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The disclosure resembled prior comments made last year by FBI Director Kash Patel and former Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who said investigators had uncovered caches of records tied to the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, including documents found inside burn bags that they argued raised new questions about the origins of the Trump-Russia inquiry.
Crossfire Hurricane was the FBI’s investigation into possible coordination between Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and Russia. In July last year, Gabbard revealed that Obama administration officials promoted a narrative about Russian interference in the 2016 election despite intelligence information that she said undermined those claims.