By
Elie Honig,
a former federal and state prosecutor and a contributor to CAFE
If you had told me 20 years ago, when I first met Todd Blanche, that he’d be up for confirmation as attorney general of the United States, I would have been thrilled. He’s an excellent choice, I probably would have said — experienced, capable, decent. I would have said the same ten years ago or even two years ago.
But things have changed. More precisely, Blanche has changed. Long forgotten (or willfully discarded) are the core principles we learned as rookies and later passed on to future generations of Southern District of New York prosecutors: judicious use of the fearsome power to disrupt lives and strip away a defendant’s individual liberty; commitment to the truth, unvarnished and unspun, even if detrimental to our own case; prosecution insulated from politics.
