# Attorney General The **Attorney General of the United States** is the head of the [[Department of Justice]] and the chief law-enforcement officer of the federal government — the only Cabinet office created in the very first Congress (Judiciary Act of 1789) and the only one whose department did not exist until eighty-one years later, in 1870. The office is filled by presidential nomination and Senate confirmation, and the holder serves at the President's pleasure. For this vault the AG matters as a **choke point** rather than a biography. The Attorney General is the person who decides whether to appoint a [[Special Counsel]] and the only person who can remove one; who writes and expands a special counsel's jurisdiction; who decides annually whether a special counsel's investigation continues; who decides whether a special counsel's confidential report is ever published; who reviews executive orders "as to both form and legality" through the [[Office of Legal Counsel]]; and who can certify a Board of Immigration Appeals decision to himself and rewrite the precedent. Nearly every accountability mechanism the federal government has for investigating the executive branch routes through this one Senate-confirmed seat. **Current holder:** [[Todd Blanche]], confirmed 50–49 on August 8, 2026 and sworn in August 10, 2026, after serving as Deputy Attorney General from March 6, 2025 and as Acting Attorney General from April 2, 2026. His predecessor [[Pam Bondi]] was fired on April 2, 2026. ## The norm-erosion arc The office's independence was never statutory; it was a norm, and the norm has a short and specific history. Until Watergate the Attorney General was routinely the President's political intimate — Robert Kennedy under his brother, [[John Mitchell]] as Nixon's campaign manager turned AG. The [[Saturday Night Massacre]] (October 20, 1973), in which [[Elliot Richardson]] and his deputy resigned rather than fire the Watergate special prosecutor and [[Robert Bork]] did it, produced the post-Watergate settlement: the [[Independent Counsel]] statute (1978–1999), the White House contacts policy limiting who may speak to the Department about cases, and the expectation that an AG recuses when the President is the subject. [[Edwin Meese]] tested the settlement from the right in the 1980s; [[Janet Reno]] honored it against her own President; [[William Barr]] dismantled it in practice in 2019–20 while keeping its forms. The second term dispensed with the forms. [[Pam Bondi]] (February 2025–April 2, 2026) took office announcing a [[Weaponization Working Group]] to investigate the Department's own prior prosecutions of the President; the [[Erik Siebert]] episode — a U.S. Attorney replaced by [[Lindsey Halligan]] within days to secure the [[Comey Indictment]] — showed the President directing individual charging decisions; and Bondi was herself fired. [[Todd Blanche]], the President's former criminal-defense lawyer, was Acting AG from that day and confirmed 50–49 on August 8, 2026. The seat that every accountability mechanism routes through is now held by the man who defended the President at trial. See [[DOJ Component Tree]] for what the office controls and [[Special Counsel Appointment and Removal Flow]] for the mechanism that was built to be unenforceable. ## Holders since Watergate Richardson (1973) · Bork, acting (1973–74) · William Saxbe · Edward Levi · Griffin Bell · Benjamin Civiletti · William French Smith · [[Edwin Meese]] · Dick Thornburgh · Barr (1991–93) · [[Janet Reno]] · John Ashcroft · Alberto Gonzales · Michael Mukasey · [[Eric Holder]] · [[Loretta Lynch]] · Jeff Sessions · [[William Barr]] (2019–20) · [[Merrick Garland]] · [[Pam Bondi]] · [[Todd Blanche]]. ## See Also - [[Department of Justice]] · [[DOJ Component Tree]] - [[Special Counsel]] · [[Special Counsel Appointment and Removal Flow]] - [[Office of Legal Counsel]] · [[Office of Legal Policy]] - [[Executive Branch Org Chart]] · [[Confirmation Pipeline]]