It was less than two weeks after Todd Blanche took on his role of deputy attorney general in March 2025 when the Justice Department’s top ethics lawyer delivered some straightforward yet inconvenient news: His recusal from legal cases that involved President Donald Trump in his personal capacity was necessary.
The official conducting the briefing, Joseph Tirrell, handed Blanche and his then-top deputy Emil Bove, who was also in the conference room, a printed PowerPoint presentation on ethics, according to a former senior Justice ethics official who described the meeting to CNN.
The meeting, which hasn’t previously been reported, is the first time Blanche was formally informed he would need to recuse himself from cases involving Trump. Around the same time, the department’s top career lawyer advised that Bove potentially had a conflict of interest by being involved in firings of DOJ lawyers.
Recusal, however, is a word that comes with treacherous consequences in the Trump era — including in the case of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions who Trump tormented after he recused himself from overseeing what eventually became the Mueller investigation. Blanche’s choice is either to oversee investigations the president cares deeply about but risk damaging their viability in court or to recuse himself and risk incurring the president’s wrath.
