Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday that he’d be willing to serve as the attorney general permanently if asked by President Trump, after Pam Bondi was ousted from the post last week.
Speaking at a press conference to announce the creation of a new National Fraud Enforcement Division, Blanche introduced himself as the acting attorney general, even though Bondi’s portrait is still hanging on the walls throughout the building, and said he still planned to travel with her Wednesday to a previously scheduled event.
“I did not ask for this job,” he told the press. “I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime, and if President Trump chooses to keep me as acting, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate me, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and I go back to being the [Deputy Attorney General], that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘thank you very much, I love you, sir.'”
Bondi’s removal last week came amid frustrations by Mr. Trump that the Justice Department has not worked swiftly enough to prosecute his political enemies, CBS previously reported.
Blanche claimed on Tuesday not to know the reasons for Bondi’s removal, and praised her for her leadership.
“Pam Bondi is a trusted friend of President Trump’s,” he said. “Nobody has any idea why the attorney general is no longer the attorney general and I’m the acting attorney general, except for the president.”
Trump advisers have also been actively discussing whether to further shake up senior leadership by possibly demoting Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and elevating Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the Civil Rights Division. But this hasn’t happened yet, and Woodward watched the press conference from the back of the room on Tuesday. It remains unclear whether additional personnel moves could come.
Blanche fended off questions about whether he will be facing additional pressure by Mr. Trump to secure indictments against political opponents, saying every case would be investigated “to the fullest extent of the law, using all of the resources we can,” including those involving Mr. Trump’s enemies.
“We have thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now, and it is true that some of them involve men women and entities that the president in the past has had issues with,” Blanche said.
“I do not view this as pressure,” he added. “I do not view this as something that is going to keep me up at night.”
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images 
Blanche also said that the Justice Department’s new fraud division would be willing to accept criminal referrals from the White House, though the new assistant attorney general, Colin McDonald, will not be formally reporting to the White House. When Vice President JD Vance announced the creation of the position in January, he said that it would be run out of the White House and he and Mr. Trump would oversee it. He later walked those comments back, and documents outlining the structure sent to Capitol Hill showed that McDonald will be reporting to senior Justice Department leadership, as do all of the other assistant attorneys general.
This arrangement is a stark departure from prior norms instituted after the Watergate scandal, which sought to insulate criminal investigations from political influence from the White House.
“There is always communication between a president and his priorities and what the Department of Justice should be focused on and not focused on,” he said. “If the president of our United States says, ‘I have heard that there is ongoing fraud in Minneapolis, Minnesota,’ like any president before him, I hope that the attorney general would absolutely say, ‘Yes, we’ll investigate that,'” Blanche said.
Blanche said the new fraud division will combine a variety of offices at the department that handle mostly criminal fraud involving health care, taxes fraud, benefits and corporate fraud and bring them together under one roof.
He also announced the establishment of a new prosecutor-led national fraud detection center composed of data analysts from multiple federal agencies that will aim to “ferret out the most harmful actors defrauding federal government programs.”
