# Todd Blanche **Todd Blanche** is the Attorney General of the United States, confirmed **50–49 on August 8, 2026** (Senate roll call 230; Collins and Murkowski voting no, McConnell absent) — see [[Todd Blanche Confirmation]]. He reached the office by a route with no precedent: personal criminal-defense lawyer to [[Donald Trump]] (2023–2025, including the New York hush-money trial and the classified-documents and election-interference cases), then Deputy Attorney General under [[Pam Bondi]] from 2025, then Acting Attorney General after Trump removed Bondi, then the nomination. The former-defense-counsel-turned-enforcement-chief pattern is mechanism #6 of [[Elite Impunity]] (compare [[Philander Knox]]); Blanche is its purest modern instance because the client is the sitting president. ## The Anti-Weaponization Fund As Deputy AG, Blanche **established the $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund"** as part of settling Trump's lawsuit against the IRS over leaked tax returns, and released the settlement agreements after Judge [[Kathleen Williams]] had agreed to close the case — see [[Trump IRS Lawsuit Settlement]]. Asked under oath whether January 6 rioters who assaulted police could collect from it, he would not rule it out. A federal judge temporarily blocked payouts on May 29, 2026. The fund nearly cost him the confirmation. Senators Cornyn and Tillis demanded written assurances it was defunct; on **August 2, 2026** Blanche declared that the order establishing it "is rescinded and shall have no force or effect." Bill Cassidy supplied the decisive vote despite stated concerns about Blanche's judgment on IRS audits and DOJ suits against Trump's perceived enemies. Whether a rescission by memo survives litigation over money already committed is an open question. ## The IRS immunity addendum On **May 19, 2026**, as Acting Attorney General, Blanche personally signed the settlement addendum declaring the IRS "forever barred" from auditing or prosecuting Trump, his sons, and the [[Trump Organization]] over past tax filings — see [[Trump IRS Tax Immunity Deal]]. The same day, his DOJ indicted former federal prosecutor [[Carmen Lineberger]] for emailing herself copies of the suppressed [[Jack Smith Report Volume II]] — a prosecution undercut in July 2026 when the department admitted it had itself sent three copies of the report to her defense counsel in discovery. ## The case quota (July 2026) The [[DOJ Case Quota Directive]] — a requirement that line prosecutors across all 93 U.S. Attorneys' offices maintain a minimum of **25 open cases** — was communicated from Blanche's office and reported publicly in July 2026. Associate Deputy Attorney General [[Aakash Singh]] has been identified as the official driving the case-volume push. Because the quota counts *cases* rather than loss amounts or complexity, it structurally rewards small, fast charging decisions over multi-year financial investigations. It is the mechanism underlying [[Fraud Enforcement Inversion]], and it operated alongside a fall in white-collar criminal prosecutions to 4,747 — about 5% of all federal criminal cases, a modern low. ## Why he matters in this vault Blanche is the hinge between two of the vault's through-lines. On the [[Elite Impunity]] side he is the official who converted a private settlement into a public fund and a permanent tax immunity for his former client. On the [[Fraud Enforcement Inversion]] side he is the official whose quota reshaped what federal prosecutors prosecute. The [[Trump Retribution Ecosystem]] and [[Presumption of Regularity]] pages link here because his tenure is the test of whether courts continue to presume good faith from a Justice Department run by the president's former defense lawyer. ## See Also - [[Todd Blanche Confirmation]] · [[Pam Bondi]] · [[Donald Trump]] - [[Trump IRS Lawsuit Settlement]] · [[Trump IRS Tax Immunity Deal]] - [[DOJ Case Quota Directive]] · [[Aakash Singh]] · [[Fraud Enforcement Inversion]] - [[Elite Impunity]] · [[Federal Prosecutors Hub]]