FBI Director Comey wouldn’t act as Trump’s Roy Cohn, and Trump fired him. This despite Comey inadvertently swinging the election of 2016 to Trump by sending a letter to Congress less than two weeks before the election saying that the FBI had learned of “the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent” to the investigation into Clinton’s email server, which had initially been closed in July. Comey did this over the objections of career DOJ prosecutors and in violation of a longstanding unwritten DOJ practice of avoiding overt law enforcement and prosecutorial activities close to an election, typically within 60 days of Election Day.
Trump appointed Senator Jeff Sessions as Attorney General despite the fact that 30 years earlier a bipartisan majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee rejected Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Sessions to be a federal judge after they heard testimony about Sessions’ pattern of racist statements, his hostility toward civil rights groups, and his targeting of voting rights as a federal prosecutor in his home state of Alabama during the 1980s.
As it happens, I was involved in contesting the actions of Sessions and others to suppress the votes of blacks in the Alabama Black Belt by working with colleagues to bring the lawyer and several activists to Boston-area universities and media to publicize the voter suppression efforts and the resistance. We also sent groups of students to Alabama to be a presence and to assist residents in voting.
As Trump’s Attorney General, Sessions dropped 25 investigations into racial Patterns and Practices against 25 police departments that had begun under President Obama. But that was not enough. Trump fired Sessions after Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election because he had been a key figure in the Trump presidential campaign.
Then Trump nominated William Barr, who had previously been Attorney General in the George H. W. Bush administration. Three months into his tenure as Attorney General, the Associated Press characterized Barr as a champion and advocate for Trump.
Barr did many things for Trump, but the most significant might have been his misrepresentation of the Mueller Report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election before the report was released. He argued officially that the report had exonerated Trump from obstruction, which it did not. Yet Barr broke with Trump over Trump’s claims about the 2020 election and resigned just weeks before the end of Trump’s first term.
At the beginning of his second term, Trump appointed Pam Bondi as Attorney General. But apparently, she did not fill the “Roy Cohn” bill, so he dismissed her. And now Trump appears to have gotten his “Roy Cohn” with Todd Blanche, the Interim AG, who was Trump’s private lawyer before Trump regained the presidency.
Trump has nominated Blanche to be Attorney General, but there are plenty of reasons for opposition. Perhaps Exhibit One is the “slush fund” setup led by Blanche as interim AG.
Trump, his two eldest sons, and the Trump Organization sued the IRS and the Treasury Department, seeking at least $10 billion in damages for failing to protect his confidential tax information after an IRS contractor leaked his records in 2019. Thus, Trump was suing his own government.
On July 13, 2026, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of the Southern District of Florida issued a landmark ruling that voided the settlement orchestrated by Blanche, a $1.776 billion taxpayer-funded Anti-Weaponization Fund (the slush fund that Trump could use almost as he wished), and halted IRS audits of Trump’s finances. The judge also referred several lawyers involved in the case to state bar authorities for potential professional discipline.
The Judge referred Blanche to the proceedings requesting an investigation of Blanche. Democracy Defenders Fund, Lawyers Defending American Democracy, and a group of 101 former federal and state judges filed a complaint against Blanche with the New York State Bar, which included a formal request for an ethics investigation.
While the New York State Bar may decline to review this case, there are many activities under DOJ that might get some lawyers disbarred, as happened eventually to Roy Cohn.
