President-elect Donald Trump has said he would name Todd Blanche, who oversaw his legal defence against multiple indictments, to become the No 2 official at the Justice Department.
The selection of Mr Blanche, a former supervising federal prosecutor in Manhattan, as the deputy attorney general at the Justice Department serves as a pointed rebuke to the criminal cases against Mr Trump. A day earlier, Mr Trump had selected Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican and a caustic critic of the FBI and the department, to become attorney general.
Mr Blanche was Mr Trump’s lead lawyer at his trial in New York state court this year, which ended in the former president being convicted on all 34 counts of falsifying business records over a 2016 hush money payment to a porn actor.
Mr Blanche forged a unique connection with the president-elect this year, having defended him at trial. For weeks inside a Manhattan criminal courthouse, Mr Trump and Mr Blanche sat inches apart, often whispering to each other during long days of legal arguments and testimony.
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In defending Mr Trump, Mr Blanche assembled a legal team that had to fight simultaneously on multiple legal fronts, all amid the pressure of a presidential campaign. Mr Blanche (50), left a prestigious law firm to represent Mr Trump, a client whom few major firms were willing to represent. That gamble now appears to have paid off handsomely for Mr Blanche.
The defence strategy for all of the indictments against Mr Trump could be boiled down to one word: delay. And in most of the cases it worked, if not exactly how he and his team had initially envisioned.
Along the way, Mr Blanche often faced blistering criticism from judges who disliked Mr Trump’s legal arguments, or the candidate’s bombast outside the courtroom.
As a young prosecutor, Mr Blanche handled violent-crime cases in Manhattan federal court, eventually becoming a supervisor in that work. After leaving the prosecutor’s office, he became a private practice defence lawyer.
Others on Mr Trump’s legal team are also in line to receive top assignments. He said he would name Emil Bove, who defended him in the hush money case, as principal associate deputy attorney general, and D John Sauer, who represented him before the supreme court in arguing that he was entitled to broad immunity, as solicitor general.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times