A Feature Not a Bug: Todd Blanche and the Really Long List of Awful Attorney Generals

When the U.S. Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as permanent Attorney General—by a pre-dawn 50–49 vote under cover of darkness—the corporate media immediately broke out into its standard, well-rehearsed theater of outrage. Editorial boards and liberal commentators lined up to decry Blanche as a unique degradation of the office. They pointed frantically to his history as Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney, his eager defense of the "unitary executive" theory (reducing the Justice Department to a direct weapon of the White House), his suppression of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and his cover-up of violent ICE operations against immigrants and anti-war protesters.

To listen to mainstream commentary, one would think the U.S. Department of Justice was, until recently, a pristine sanctuary of constitutional law, equal justice, and high ethical standards—now regrettably defiled by a singular "legal attack dog."

This narrative is a deliberate, historical fraud.

Todd Blanche is not a shocking anomaly or a bizarre departure from American institutional tradition. He is merely the latest steward of a state agency whose defining, historical purpose is the defense of capitalist property, the suppression of internal political dissent, and the legal codification of imperialist violence. In an imperialist superpower, an Attorney General cannot be anything other than a ruthless enforcer. The brutality, corruption, and authoritarianism on display in the Department of Justice are not bugs in the political system; they are its fundamental features.

A look back at the last nine U.S. Attorneys General reveals that Blanche’s conduct is not an aberration, but the continuation of an unbroken lineage of state repression.

The Predecessors: Modern Stewards of Class Rule

Before Blanche assumed the role, Pam Bondi set the stage by functioning as a loyal partisan operative inside the executive branch. Her brief tenure served to expedite the purging of DOJ personnel deemed insufficiently subservient to the White House and to fast-track police-state measures against immigrant workers and political dissidents. When she was axed for failing to prosecute political enemies with enough speed and malice, Blanche simply picked up the baton.

Before Bondi stood Merrick Garland, the liberal establishment’s darling, whose appointment by the Biden administration was hailed as a "restoration of the rule of law." Yet under Garland’s leadership, the DOJ’s core function remained unchanged. Garland oversaw the expansion of domestic counter-terrorism apparatuses aimed at working-class struggles, maintained brutal border restrictions, shielded intelligence agencies from accountability for foreign surveillance and war crimes, and aggressively pursued whistleblowers and anti-war activists. Garland demonstrated precisely how the Democratic Party utilizes the DOJ: behind a veneer of legal institutionalism, the state's repressive apparatus continues unabated.

Garland’s predecessor, William Barr—who served two distinct terms under Donald Trump and George H.W. Bush—was one of the chief architects of modern presidential dictatorship. Barr explicitly championed the "unitary executive" doctrine decades before Blanche was questioned on it. During the mass social uprisings of 2020 following the police murder of George Floyd, Barr deployed federal paramilitary forces against peaceful protesters in Washington D.C. and Portland, labeling anti-fascist and left-wing dissenters as domestic terrorists. Decades earlier, as H.W. Bush’s Attorney General, Barr helped orchestrate the pardons that covered up the Iran-Contra affair, shielding the CIA and executive branch officials from accountability for illegal covert wars and death-squad funding in Central America.

Barr was preceded by Jeff Sessions, a long-time white supremacist politician from Alabama who brought explicit nativism to the DOJ. Sessions instituted the infamously cruel "zero tolerance" immigration policy, which led to the systematic separation of thousands of migrant children from their families at the U.S. border. Sessions also rolled back minimal consent decrees monitoring police department abuses and launched aggressive federal crackdowns on civil rights demonstrations.

The Democratic Technocrats: Legalizing Imperial War and Surveillance

The liberal mythology that police-state brutality is strictly a Republican enterprise evaporates when examining the Democratic administrations of Barack Obama.

Loretta Lynch, who succeeded Eric Holder, continued the administration's relentless prosecution of whistleblowers under the Espionage Act. Under her tenure, the DOJ defended the mass warrantless surveillance programs exposed by Edward Snowden, shielded the architects of CIA torture and illegal drone strikes from prosecution, and deployed federal law enforcement to suppress Indigenous and environmental activists resisting oil pipelines at Standing Rock.

Lynch’s predecessor, Eric Holder, earned the distinction of being the first sitting Attorney General to be held in contempt of Congress, but his real crimes were against international law and the working class. Holder provided the legal rationale for the Obama administration’s "kill list," draft-writing memoes that authorized the extrajudicial assassination of U.S. citizens abroad via drone strikes without a shred of due process. Holder oversaw the historic crackdown on whistleblowers, prosecuted journalists, protected Wall Street executives from criminal prosecution following the 2008 financial crash, and presided over the militarization of local police departments across the United States.

The Architects of the "War on Terror" and War Crimes

The record degenerates further as one examines the cabinet officials who built the modern American national security state during the Bush administration.

Michael Mukasey stepped into the DOJ to ensure that the criminal practices of the Bush era remained insulated from prosecution. Mukasey actively shielded the CIA from investigations into the destruction of interrogation videotapes depicting waterboarding and other illegal torture techniques. He maintained that Bush's warrantless wiretapping program was entirely lawful and refused to enforce congressional subpoenas against executive branch officials.

Mukasey’s predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, was literally the chief legal advisor for the Bush administration's war crimes. As White House Counsel and later Attorney General, Gonzales authored the infamous "torture memos," which dismissed the Geneva Conventions as "quaint" and "obsolete," providing pseudo-legal cover for the CIA and military to utilize waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and stress positions at Black Sites, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib. Gonzales resigned in disgrace in 2007 following a scandal involving the political firing of U.S. Attorneys who refused to launch trumped-up voter fraud investigations targeting Democratic voters.

Before Gonzales was John Ashcroft, installed following the contested 2000 election. In the wake of September 11, Ashcroft drafted and executed the PATRIOT Act, which dismantled core Fourth Amendment protections and inaugurated an era of mass warrantless surveillance. Ashcroft oversaw the round-up and indefinite detention of hundreds of Arab and Muslim immigrants without charges, established military tribunals, and aggressively attacked civil liberties, reproductive rights, and political dissent under the banner of national security.

The Ruling Class and the Imperialist Necessity

When viewed sequentially—Bondi, Garland, Barr, Sessions, Lynch, Holder, Mukasey, Gonzales, Ashcroft—a clear, inescapable pattern emerges.

The corporate media frames each successive scandal as an isolated breach of ethics by a "bad actor." They lament that Todd Blanche is a "personal fixer," that Alberto Gonzales was a "crony," or that William Barr was an "ideologue." By focusing entirely on individual personality traits, bourgeois commentators obscure the underlying class reality: the U.S. Department of Justice does not exist to administer justice. It exists to manage the domestic police force of a world-spanning empire.

An imperialist state that spends trillions on global military dominance, conducts illegal bombings, enforces economic blockades, and starves foreign populations cannot maintain a polite, democratic legal system at home. Imperialism abroad inevitably demands dictatorship, surveillance, and repression at home. As the crisis of global capitalism deepens—marked by staggering wealth inequality, soaring military conflict, and rising social discontent—the ruling class can no longer govern through traditional democratic forms.

Todd Blanche’s open conversion of the DOJ into a direct weapon of executive tyranny, his suppression of state crimes, his shielding of corporate oligarchs, and his terrorization of immigrant workers and anti-war protesters are not corrupt detours from the norm. They represent the bare-knuckled reality of capitalist state power stripped of its democratic pretenses.

Blanche is not a bug in the machinery of American imperialism. He is its ultimate, fully evolved feature. The working class cannot combat this threat by appealing to the fictitious "independence" of bourgeois institutions, but only through a unified, independent struggle against the capitalist system that these Attorneys General are hired to protect.