Justin Lane/Pool Photo via AP
President-elect Donald Trump has turned to his legal defense team to fill the top three positions in the Department of Justice after the position of Attorney General.
Todd Blanche, a Department of Justice veteran and former supervising prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, has been nominated to serve as Deputy Attorney General, the number-two slot in that agency. Blanche served as Trump's primary defense counsel in his federal and New York cases.
Emil Bove was co-counsel with Blanche on Trump's trials. He is also a veteran federal prosecutor who served in the Southern District of New York.
D. John Sauer, former solicitor general for Missouri and the man who won Trump's immunity case before the Supreme Court, will become US Solicitor General.
These appointments show why the fixation on Matt Gaetz is mostly posturing. This team has not only worked for Trump; they have worked together very successfully. They are seasoned trial lawyers, and two of them know how the Department of Justice works. They are the guys who will be in charge of Justice's day-to-day operations, and any substantive reform of that agency will be their doing.
The great legal minds inside the Department of Justice who ran the various legal cases against Trump and his associates, the jaywalkers and trespassers of January 6, and pro-life grandmas may have just entered the FO stage of FAFO.
