President-elect Trump announced Thursday he will nominate three of his personal criminal defense attorneys to serve in senior Justice Department roles.
Todd Blanche will serve as deputy attorney general, and Emil Bove will serve as principal associate deputy attorney general, the department’s No. 3 official, Trump announced in a statement.
Both men serve as Trump’s trial attorneys in his New York hush money case, which culminated in the first criminal conviction of a former president this spring, and Trump’s two federal criminal prosecutions brought by special counsel Jack Smith.
Trump also announced Thursday he will nominate D. John Sauer, an appellate attorney who argued Trump’s presidential immunity case at the Supreme Court earlier this year, as solicitor general.
That position is the fourth highest-ranking Justice Department role and decides which cases the government will appeal, including representing the administration before the nation’s highest court.
The three attorneys will presumably serve under former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), whom Trump announced as his attorney general nominee one day prior, sending political shock waves through Washington.
Unlike Gaetz, both Blanche and Bove previously worked as prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.
Trump in his announcement highlighted that experience, making no mention of the duo’s work as his defense attorneys.
“Todd is an excellent attorney who will be a crucial leader in the Justice Department, fixing what has been a broken System of Justice for far too long,” Trump said of Blanche.
The president-elect similarly wrote of Bove, “Emil is a tough and strong attorney, who will be a crucial part of the Justice Department, rooting out corruption and crime.”
Both entered private practice before ultimately joining Trump’s criminal defense team last year.
Blanche started representing the former president when he was indicted in New York on 34 counts of falsifying business records in April 2023, his first set of criminal charges. To do so, Blanche was forced to leave his partnership at a prominent law firm, and he created his own firm instead.
Bove began working for Blanche’s new firm later in the year as Smith moved to indict Trump in Washington, D.C., on accusations of conspiring to subvert the 2020 election results and in Florida on charges of mishandling classified documents.
Sauer, Trump’s solicitor general nominee, served as Missouri’s solicitor general for six years. He worked under Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) during their stints as state attorney general.
Sauer also clerked for Antonin Scalia, the late conservative Supreme Court justice.
In announcing Sauer, Trump did highlight the attorney’s work on his criminal defense: “Most recently, John was the lead counsel representing me in the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States, winning a Historic Victory on Presidential Immunity, which was key to defeating the unConstitutional campaign of Lawfare against me and the entire MAGA Movement,” Trump wrote.
Sauer also represents Trump in his appeal of a jury’s verdict in a civil suit finding the former president liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s.
Updated 6:58 p.m.
