Trump Turns to His Personal Lawyers to Stock Top Ranks of Justice Dept.

Trump Turns to His Personal Lawyers to Stock Top Ranks of Justice Dept.

The president-elect intends to nominate three members of his criminal defense team to senior roles, raising further concerns about politicization of the department.

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By Alan Feuer and Maggie Haberman

For more than two years, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s lawyers did the job they were hired to do, defending him against a barrage of criminal charges with an aggressive strategy of confrontation and delay.

But in working for Mr. Trump, they also used the tools of their trade — their legal briefs and courtroom hearings — to advance a political message that ultimately helped their client get back into the White House.

Now, after fighting for Mr. Trump in case after case that they helped turn into a form of political theater, some of those lawyers are being rewarded again for their work. Mr. Trump has said he intends to nominate them to high-ranking posts in the Justice Department, which he has made clear he wants to operate as a legal arm of the White House rather than with the quasi-independence that has been the post-Watergate norm.

After the president-elect’s announcement this week that he wants Matt Gaetz, the controversial former Florida congressman and a longtime ally, to be his attorney general, he named Todd Blanche and Emil Bove, two experienced former federal prosecutors who took the lead in defending Mr. Trump at his state trial in Manhattan and against two federal indictments, to fill the No. 2 and No. 3 positions in the department.

A third lawyer, D. John Sauer, who was the Missouri solicitor general and oversaw Mr. Trump’s appellate battles, was chosen to represent the department in front of the Supreme Court as the U.S. solicitor general.

Another lawyer, Stanley Woodward Jr., who defended several people in Mr. Trump’s orbit and helped in the process of vetting his vice-presidential pick, has also been mentioned for a top legal job, though it remains unclear if he will actually receive a role.

Throughout American history, presidents have made a habit of installing lawyers close to them in powerful positions. George Washington picked his personal lawyer, Edmund Randolph, as his first attorney general, and John F. Kennedy put his brother Robert in the post.

But until now, no president had ever nominated his own criminal defense team to top jobs in the Justice Department. And Mr. Trump’s choice of Mr. Blanche, Mr. Bove and Mr. Sauer runs the risk of turning the agency into something it was never meant to be: the president’s private law firm.

“It’s a strange move, for sure, although that’s not to say that you can’t be Trump’s defense lawyer and still be a good lawyer,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a former Justice Department official who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School. “Still, it raises all sorts of complex conflicts of interest and raises questions about whether the Justice Department should exist to protect the president of the United States.”

At the same time, there has never been a president who entered office having experienced a criminal trial, and three other indictments in different places.

Mr. Trump’s transition office did not respond to an email seeking comment.

When Mr. Trump first came under investigation after he left office, he had a hard time finding — and keeping — lawyers to defend him.

Two of his original lawyers, James Trusty and John Rowley, stepped down from the job shortly after he was indicted in Florida in June 2023 on charges of mishandling classified documents. The month before the indictment was issued, another lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, also quit the team, citing problems with Mr. Trump’s adviser Boris Epshteyn.

After Mr. Trump was charged again in Washington, accused of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, he settled on a legal team that included Mr. Blanche, who was already representing him in the Manhattan case where he faced charges of falsifying business records to cover up a sex scandal.

As each of the proceedings ground toward trial, Mr. Bove and Mr. Sauer joined the team.

Unlike Mr. Gaetz, all of the other Justice Department picks are courtroom veterans and, should they be confirmed, would bring to their jobs a wealth of experience in handling legal matters.

After attending Brooklyn Law School at night, Mr. Blanche spent several years as a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, one of the country’s premier federal law enforcement agencies, eventually becoming a supervisor overseeing violent criminal cases. He then entered private practice and has represented people close to Mr. Trump, including Paul Manafort, the chairman of his 2016 presidential campaign, as well as Mr. Epshteyn.

Mr. Bove overlapped with Mr. Blanche in the prosecutor’s office, where he developed an expertise in classified information law and a reputation for handling complex international investigations. Among his most prominent cases was the prosecution of a South African crime lord, Paul Le Roux, and several mercenaries who worked for him, including a former U.S. soldier nicknamed Rambo.

Mr. Sauer, who once clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia, argued several appellate matters on Mr. Trump’s behalf. He challenged a gag order placed on Mr. Trump in his federal election case in Washington and appeared before the Supreme Court, ultimately winning a historic case that granted former presidents a broad form of immunity from criminal prosecution.

In private conversations, some of Mr. Trump’s lawyers have appeared not to be engaging in spin so much as displaying a sincere sense of outrage over the indictments against Mr. Trump, which they genuinely view as flawed at best and tainted by politics against their client at worst.

Still, in the course of defending Mr. Trump, each of the men has strayed at times beyond the strict boundaries of their roles as legal advocates, often advancing in court (or court filings) what amounted to their client’s political talking points.

Over and over, they amplified Mr. Trump’s claims that the cases brought against him by the special counsel Jack Smith, or by local prosecutors, were partisan witch hunts intended to destroy his chances of regaining power.

Just last month, for instance, Mr. Blanche and Mr. Bove put their names to a motion complaining that a sprawling government document detailing Mr. Trump’s attempts to reverse the last election was “a politically motivated manifesto” that prosecutors were seeking to release to the public “in the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election.”

In reality, the document was produced by Mr. Smith’s deputies on the Supreme Court’s orders as part of its immunity decision. And the judge overseeing the election case, Tanya S. Chutkan, scolded Mr. Blanche, Mr. Bove and other members of the team for “focusing on political rhetoric rather than addressing the legal issues at hand.”

“Not only is that focus unresponsive and unhelpful to the court,” Judge Chutkan wrote, “but it is also unbefitting of experienced defense counsel and undermining of the judicial proceedings in this case.”

In April, Mr. Sauer stepped out onto his own legal limb for Mr. Trump when he appeared in front of the Supreme Court to make his immunity claims for Mr. Trump.

In a now-famous exchange, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked Mr. Sauer whether a president’s decision to use the military to assassinate a rival should be considered an official act “for which he could get immunity.”

“It would depend on the hypothetical,” Mr. Sauer said, shocking many legal experts. “We can see that could well be an official act.”

Beyond such acts of legal loyalty, Mr. Trump’s lawyers have also seemed to recognize the importance of proximity to this particular client.

Even before the trial in Manhattan, where Mr. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies, Mr. Blanche, who was based in New York City, bought a home in Palm Beach County, Fla., near Mar-a-Lago, his client’s private club and residence. At the trial, he displayed a close relationship with Mr. Trump, sitting inches from him during long days of testimony and standing, mute, by his side each time he addressed reporters.

This summer, some of Mr. Trump’s lawyers were seen in suites at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.

Daniel C. Richman, a former federal prosecutor and law professor at Columbia University, said that Mr. Blanche, Mr. Bove and Mr. Sauer could face significant conflicts of interest once they enter office.

As Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers, he said, they still have a duty to protect his interests in the cases they worked on, and that could present a problem if their responsibilities to the public pull them in a different direction.

“We can’t be sure how this will play out,” Mr. Richman said, “but it’s certainly an issue to spot.”

Questions like these already seemed to have concerned top Democrats, including Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, who will lead the party’s interrogation of the nominees at upcoming confirmation hearings.

“Donald Trump viewed the Justice Department as his personal law firm during his first term,” Mr. Durbin said on Friday, “and these selections — his personal attorneys — are poised to do his bidding.”

Trump Builds His Administration

As his team ramps up the transition process, President-elect Donald Trump says his administration will radically reshape the federal government.

• Health and Human Services: Trump said he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism and unorthodox views about medicine, including about fluoride in water, make public health officials uneasy.
• Immigration: Trump’s plans to expel noncitizens on a mass scale are likely to raise prices on goods and services and lower employment rates for U.S. workers, many economists say.
• Middle East: Trump’s emerging team in the Middle East appears poised to push U.S. foreign policy into even tighter accord with Israel’s far-right government.
• Skirting the Senate: Trump’s demand that Senate Republicans surrender their role in vetting his nominees poses an early test of whether his second term will be more radical than his first.
• Slashing Government: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tapped to lead what Trump called the Department of Government Efficiency, which he said would seek “drastic change.”