The reckoning is coming for Trump's DOJ.

The last attorney general who turned the Justice Department into a weapon went to federal prison. The pardon power could not save him. And it won't protect Trump's team.

Todd Blanche went on Meet the Press this Sunday looking like a man who knew he had a problem. The indictment of James Comey over an Instagram post looked shaky. But the bigger problem (which he didn’t seem to grasp) is that he might be the one engaging in illegal activity.

The acting attorney general was sent out onto the news shows this weekend to defend the indictment of James Comey for a photograph of seashells on a North Carolina beach. He seemed nervous. The case has been mocked, even by GOP senators who’ve suggested that Comey engaged in obviously First Amendment protected speech.

Yet Blanche’s over-eager pitch (repeated several times in mere minutes) was that there is “more” here than the public can see.

“This is not just about a single Instagram post,” he told host Kristen Welker. “This is about a body of evidence.”

If that is true, it took a long time. The FBI had been looking at the case for eleven months, along with the Secret Service. Blanche didn’t offer any indication of exactly what kind of evidence he had to show the FBI director intended to make an assassination threat against the president. He simply stressed that the additional evidence will come out at trial. (As many legal commentators have pointed out, if there is more evidence, it must legally be shared with Comey well before any trial.)

The real issue isn’t how flimsy the James Comey case is. It’s whether Todd Blanche understands that a much bigger case is being assembled. The one against himself.

You see, in the ugly history of attorneys general who turned the Justice Department into a weapon, none of them believed that a reckoning was coming. John Mitchell didn’t believe it as he sat at the head of the Committee to Re-elect the President for President Nixon, despite approving wiretaps and hush money and the architecture of a cover-up. But he believed it on June 22, 1977, when he became the first former attorney general in American history to walk into a federal prison. He served nineteen months. Twenty-five other men around him went to prison, too. They were on the right side of the law, they thought, because they were the law.

That confidence — that the law cannot reach you because you are the one wielding it — is the oldest and most dangerous delusion in Washington. It’s the delusion under which Todd Blanche is now seemingly operating.

To be clear, the initial prosecution against Comey was already a disgrace. After President Trump publicly demanded on Truth Social that his attorney general charge Comey, Letitia James, and Adam Schiff (“JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”), DOJ put together a shoddy case within days. It was taken to court by a lawyer Trump had sent from the White House. Career prosecutors had refused to bring the case. And when the judge asked DOJ lawyers in open court whether that was true, the lawyer admitted he’d been instructed by then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s office not to answer.

That’s how the public trail first leads to the man now running the Justice Department. But it doesn’t stop there. The second prosecution of Comey was reportedly moribund, too. Yet it was suddenly resurrected as soon as Blanche took over at DOJ, following the ouster of Pam Bondi, who was reportedly fired in part because she wasn’t moving quickly enough to prosecute the president’s enemies. That timing is damning.

Even right-wing commentators seemed to understand why the case should never have seen the light of day. Eugene Volokh of the Hoover Institution has called the post “clearly not a punishable threat.” Jonathan Turley, the Fox News legal analyst, called the indictment “facially unconstitutional.” And Jimmy Gurulé, a former GOP official at the Justice Department, wrote that every DOJ lawyer who played a role in returning it should be ashamed.

“Shame” might be the least of their problems. In fact, Blanche and others may be creating serious legal trouble for themselves, now and into the future.

There is a federal statute, 18 U.S.C. § 242, passed by Congress in 1866 to protect freed slaves from Reconstruction-era officials who used state power to terrorize them. It makes it a federal crime for any person, acting “under color of any law,” to willfully deprive another person of any right secured by the Constitution. The Justice Department’s own Civil Rights Division confirms it applies to prosecutors as readily as to police officers. The right not to be prosecuted in retaliation for protected speech is among the most clearly established constitutional rights in American law.

No federal prosecutor in 2026 can credibly claim he didn’t know that bringing a case to silence a critic of the president violates the First and Fifth Amendments. So is that what happened?

Consider what a future prosecutor will see when he or she opens the Blanche file:

Donald Trump returned to office with an axe to grind against James Comey… he appointed his personal defense counsel to a top DOJ job… meanwhile, career prosecutors came under pressure to prosecute Comey yet declined to do so, and documented the reasons in a memo to DOJ leaders… the president sent a message to DOJ leaders on social media, ordering them to prosecute Comey… an interim U.S. Attorney was installed to resurrect the case because no one else would sign the indictment… a Department lawyer was instructed by Blanche’s office not to answer a federal judge’s direct question about the genesis of the case… then, months later, Blanche takes over DOJ… another Comey case is resurrected… after the president’s reported anger about the speed of prosecutions against foes…. on a charge no serious First Amendment lawyer supports… and Blanche goes out to publicly tout it.

That sure sounds to me like a bad act pattern. Perhaps even the architecture of “willful deprivation of rights under color of law.” And those are just the publicly available facts.

Of course, it’s widely believed Donald Trump will issue blanket pardons to his team before leaving to try to protect them from being investigated for such crimes. He’s said as much to staff. Hell, I was personally on the receiving end of one such assurance in Trump’s first term. The president wanted us to commit a crime at the border and said if we went to jail he’d pardon us.

But a presidential pardon won’t protect Trump’s lieutenants from Congressional investigations, state crimes, or civil actions. After January 6th, John Eastman was disbarred for “egregious and deceitful conduct.” Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in New York and Washington, D.C. And many more of Trump’s co-conspirators have faced similar proceedings. Trump’s symbolic pardons didn’t save them from state charges, shield their law licenses, or protect their reputations, and they will not save the next generation of Trump henchmen who tell themselves the same lie.

The people currently running the Justice Department genuinely seem to believe there will be no consequences. Historians have long noted how power, in the hands of those unaccustomed to losing it, has a way of feeling permanent. And Trump’s team continues to act as if they’ll never have to leave the building.

Todd Blanche and his lieutenants should ask themselves whether they wants their names in the same paragraph as John Mitchell’s. They should ask whether the law licenses they spent decades building survive the moments future bar committees open files with their names on them (perhaps that’s why DOJ is actively trying to restrict the ability of state bars to open ethics investigations into DOJ lawyers). They should ask, above all, the question every prosecutor in American history has eventually had to answer: whether the man giving the orders will still be there when the bill comes due.

The answer is obvious. Trump won’t be there to protect them. And they should act accordingly.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor

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