Todd Blanche’s Former SDNY Colleagues Vouched For Him Last Year. They Won’t Make That Mistake Again.

When Todd Blanche was nominated for Deputy Attorney General in January 2025, 116 lawyers who had served alongside him at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York signed a letter to Senate leaders calling him “a fundamentally good and decent man” who embodied DOJ’s values: “Independence, impartiality, honesty, integrity, respect, excellence, and a fierce dedication to fairness under the law.” Getting more than 100 SDNY alumni to sign anything was, as one signatory described it to MS NOW’s Lisa Rubin, “not only a labor of love, but somewhat of a feat.”

That was then.

Rubin reached out to 80 of those 116 signatories to ask whether they’d do it again. The results, published today on the first day of Blanche’s AG confirmation hearing, are instructive. Of the 10 former colleagues who agreed to speak on the record, many declined out of fear of retribution, which is its own data point, and only two said they’d sign another letter. Three said any new letter of support would be “unlikely to generate many signatures” and might actually embarrass Blanche by demonstrating how much goodwill he’s burned. One person who signed in 2025 explained their original reasoning with some candor, “Compared to possible options at the time, he seemed like a relatively sane one.” Another said Blanche had “lost substantial goodwill and even dear friendships among SDNY alumni” through his “full-throated defense of both department cases and Trump’s broader agenda.”

The two supporters who remain are doing their best. One told Rubin that Blanche is doing “the hardest job in the country right now” and that “of all of the people who are in a position to be picked, Todd is the best among them. I trust him to both aggressively pursue the administration’s policies and push back when necessary.” The other called him the best choice for this administration, full of “substance and experience.” Both of those endorsements, notably, are structured as lesser-evil arguments, echoing the framing Bill Barr deployed in his Wall Street Journal op-ed last month.

For the SDNY alumni who have moved in the other direction, the record of the last 18 months is the explanation. Former prosecutors Mimi Rocah and Perry Carbone, both SDNY veterans, both people who knew Blanche well, published an op-ed this morning explaining why they’ve joined the more than 1,200 DOJ alumni who signed the Justice Connection letter urging the Senate to reject Blanche. Rocah, who described Blanche to Joyce Vance last week as a family man, a team player, and a hard worker she once knew well, said she is now “very surprised” and “disgusted” by his “major transformation” under Trump. “We regarded Blanche highly at SDNY,” she and Carbone wrote, “but we feel obligated as former officers of the Justice Department to speak plainly.” Their concern, they said, is not political — “all presidents are entitled to appoint senior Justice Department officials who share their law enforcement priorities” — but institutional, “whether the Justice Department will continue to exist to serve the American people and whether Americans will have faith in its decisions and actions.”

That framing tracks with what the broader group of 2025 signatories told Rubin. “The absence of any groundswell to submit a letter says a lot,” one person said. Another was more blunt, “I would never, ever… put myself in that position.”

The concerns are well-documented at this point. The Epstein files. The $1.8 billion slush fund, which Blanche privately told Senator Durbin was “a mistake” while Trump has continued publicly calling it “beautiful” and “so important.” The 16,000 employees who have left DOJ, including a quarter of its attorneys. The declared right of the president to direct criminal investigations of his enemies. The political prosecutions with embarrassingly thin legal theories.

Blanche will still likely be confirmed, since, despite some notable changes in the Senate, the Republican math is still there. Susan Collins is “interested in a wide variety of issues,” her traditional prelude to ultimately voting yes. The Senate confirmed him as DAG 52-46 on a party line in 2025, and party lines have a way of holding, especially when you have a vindictive and petty man leading your party.

But the SDNY about face is useful for understanding what the last year and a half actually cost Blanche. The fall from “fundamentally good and decent man” to “disgusted” is a far one, but things can really change when you spend 18 months tearing down the institution you were hired to run.

Earlier:
Former DOJ Prosecutors To Senate: Blanche Took The Same Oath We Did. But He Didn’t Keep It.
Senator Whitehouse Would Like To Tell You Exactly What He Thinks Of Todd Blanche
Bill Barr Would Like The Senate To Know: Confirm Todd Blanche Or The Hostage Gets It
‘Todd Blanche Is Unfit For Office,’ Says The New York Times Editorial Board