SENATE CONFIRMS DEFENSE LAWYER TO PROSECUTE HIS OWN CLIENT, CALLS IT 'PROMOTION'
Todd Blanche moves from billing hourly to keep his client out of jail to running the building that jails people.
The Senate voted 50-49 early Saturday to confirm Todd Blanche, President Trump's former personal defense attorney, as Attorney General, completing what legal scholars are calling the purest form of vertical integration in American jurisprudence: defense counsel promoted directly to chief prosecutor of the same client. Two Republicans broke ranks to vote no, reportedly out of concern that 'institutional independence' means something other than 'the guy who negotiated your NDAs now controls the DOJ org chart.'
Blanche's first official act as Attorney General was reportedly updating the department's visitor badge printer so it now auto-generates 'Counsel of Record' instead of 'Witness' for a certain VIP guest. 'It's the most seamless attorney-client transition since a firm simply hired the entire jury,' said Justice Department transition spokesman Harlan Voss, adding that 'institutional knowledge transfer has never been this efficient — he already had the case files, we just gave him the building.' Voss noted the department saved considerably on outside counsel fees, since the outside counsel is now the department.
Career prosecutors, for their part, say they're relieved onboarding will be minimal, given that the new boss already knows all of the client's secrets, several of the client's other secrets, and reportedly a few secrets nobody asked about. 'Normally there's a whole ethics wall you have to build,' one longtime DOJ attorney said. 'Now we're just asking him to walk through the one he was already standing behind.' Senate leadership called the confirmation a win for efficiency, noting that combining defense and prosecution under one roof cuts out the middleman entirely — assuming anyone still remembers what the middleman was for.
