WASHINGTON — Attorney General Todd Blanche has repeatedly participated in campaign events and spoken in partisan terms about the coming midterm elections since his confirmation last month, despite criticism that he violated a long-standing Justice Department principle of steering clear of electoral politics.
This week, he waded again into those waters — twice.
Since August, Blanche has come under fire for making campaign-tinged public appearances and comments. Last month, at a rally-style event on Long Island, N.Y., he praised Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for governor of New York. Last week, Blanche delivered remarks at the Republican Party’s midterm convention.
On Tuesday, he stood at the White House podium and disparaged Democratic lawmakers while invoking the coming election, dismissing their concerns about artificial intelligence as “nothing but an effort to influence the midterms.”
And Wednesday, Blanche spoke at a campaign rally for Michael Whatley, the Republican Senate candidate in North Carolina. Echoing his convention speech, he portrayed crime rates, which continued a long-term downward trend to reach new lows in 2025, as “President Trump and Vice President Vance delivering on a promise.”
Worries about the Justice Department abandoning its long-held commitment to appear apolitical in order to maintain institutional credibility may seem beside the point. Since January 2025, dozens of judges have viewed its representations with suspicion, eroding the traditional bonds of trust, known as the “presumption of regularity,” that the courts typically grant the department.
The second Trump administration has also unabashedly destroyed the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence from the White House in investigative decisions. Early on, Blanche’s predecessor, Pam Bondi, declared, “We are so proud to work at the directive of Donald Trump.” Last September, after Trump publicly demanded that she charge several perceived adversaries, the department pushed through short-lived indictments of two of them.
Still, Blanche is dismantling another post-Watergate principle: that Justice Department leaders stay away from partisan politicking.
Joseph Tirrell, the Justice Department’s senior ethics official until the Trump administration dismissed him in July 2025, this week criticized Blanche’s participation in the Republican convention. He called the attorney general’s comments at the White House briefing “borderline” unethical, and his participation in the North Carolina rally “terrible.”
“In my former role, I would have advised the attorney general not to go to the White House and not to make comments about members of Congress within 45 days of an election,” Tirrell said. Referring to a law restricting partisan political activity by government employees, he added, “I’d say, ‘That rally sounds like a Hatch Act violation to me, and I’d advise you not to do it.’ I would want to scare that person straight.”
Stephen Gillers, a New York University law professor who specializes in legal ethics, said Blanche’s political statements and activities were protected by the First Amendment and did not violate professional conduct rule, even if they were ill-advised.
“Any attempt to discipline him will fail,” Gillers said. “That’s unfortunate. He has the ability to do what he’s doing, and he’s chosen to do it.”
The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.
When the group Public Citizen filed a Hatch Act complaint about Blanche’s comments praising Blakeman, the Justice Department told Government Executive in a statement that it was “baseless” and “a politically motivated complaint designed to weaponize the Hatch Act against the attorney general for his support of law enforcement.”
And in response to criticism last week by Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee over Blanche’s convention appearance, the department shot back on social media, “Todd Blanche’s appearance this evening in his personal capacity is legal (and has been approved by ethics).”
Legal questions center on the Hatch Act, which is ambiguous and difficult to enforce when an administration does not want to strictly adhere to it. The law and related regulations allow some political appointees, while off duty, to attend partisan events, like fundraisers and campaign rallies. Some law enforcement officials are restricted from any partisan activity, but the attorney general is not listed among them, and it is disputed whether that part of the legal limits applies to them.
Even for those who can engage in political activity in a personal capacity, the traditional test is not just whether such officials say they are doing so, but whether people would reasonably perceive them as acting in their government roles.
Cynthia Shaw, who ran the Justice Department’s ethics office throughout Trump’s first term, said the notion that high-ranking officials could simply say they are acting in a personal capacity to get around that threshold was a misunderstanding.
“The bigger the job you get, the less personal capacity you have, because when you speak, people are going to see you in your official capacity and representing the agency that you are head of,” she said.
Federal law enforcement needs to not just be fair, she added, but to be seen as fair for the long-term good of the department and society.
For that reason, the Justice Department had long held itself to a higher standard than the Hatch Act and its ambiguities. For decades, its ethics policies went beyond the statute in pushing officials to avoid events like political fundraisers and campaign rallies.
In 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland flatly banned political appointees from participating in partisan activities — even in their personal capacities, and even if their family members were the candidates.
But in March of this year, Bondi rescinded that policy, freeing political appointees to attend such events in their personal capacities subject only to the lower standards of the Hatch Act.
That weakening of ethics rules is one reason the department’s claim that Blanche’s appearance at the Republican Party convention was “approved by ethics” merits scrutiny. Another is that the administration has changed who makes ethics recommendations.
After firing Tirrell, the administration left his position vacant for nearly a year before appointing Kristina Spencer, a former aide to Vice President JD Vance who had no prior department experience.
The office of the deputy attorney general can also overrule the ethics office’s recommendations. For decades, the decision-maker was a career official, but the Trump administration moved that authority to political appointees.
The principle that the Justice Department should strive to appear apolitical took root after Watergate. President Richard Nixon’s first attorney general, John Mitchell — who later went to prison for his role in the scandal — was so deeply partisan that he resigned to run Nixon’s 1972 reelection campaign.
The attorney general immediately after established the modern norm of not acting as a political operative while in office: Edward Levi, a University of Chicago legal scholar.
Maintaining a nonpartisan image has proved difficult, partly because of the department’s power and an increasingly polarized political atmosphere. Under both parties, one attorney general after another has been accused by political opponents of politicizing the Justice Department.
In 2013, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. called himself President Barack Obama’s “wingman,” clashing with the principle of Justice Department independence. Asked last week about Blanche’s speech at the Republican convention, Holder said, “It’s unprecedented, and it’s disgraceful. Attorneys general don’t talk about political things. He shouldn’t be there.”
Holder, while serving as attorney general, never spoke at the Democratic convention or at campaign rallies. Nor did Republican attorneys general frequently accused by Democrats of politicizing the department, including Attorney General William Barr during Trump’s first term.
Gillers said that shifting standards for the conduct of attorneys general would harm the rule of law, especially if Blanche’s successors followed his example.
“This is new,” he said. “The changing image of what an attorney general should be seen to do, and how officials high in the Justice Department should behave, will not be good. We just don’t know yet how bad it will be.”
This article originally appeared in the New York Times.
