Nov. 14 (UPI) — President-elect Donald Trump announced Thursday that he has chosen two members of his personal criminal defense team to fill key roles at the Justice Department.
On the heels of his controversial choice of former Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., for attorney general, Trump nominated Todd Blanche for deputy attorney general and Emil Bove to serve as principal associate deputy attorney general. Both are members of Trump’s personal legal defense team.
Trump also selected John Sauer, who won Trump’s presidential immunity case at the Supreme Court, to fill the solicitor general post.
Blanche and Bove were both a key part of Trump’s legal defense team in Trump’s hush money and election subversion case in which the New York real estate mogul was convicted of doctoring business records to hide hush-money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels in order to hide their alleged affair from the voting public in the run up to the 2016 election.
Sauer successfully argued a case before the U.S. Supreme Court that claimed presidents are entitled to immunity from prosecution for official actions taken as president. The justices ultimately agreed and ruled in Trump’s favor.
“John is a deeply accomplished, masterful appellate attorney, who clerked for Justice Antonin Scalia in the United States Supreme Court, served as Solicitor General of Missouri for six years, and has extensive experience practicing before the U.S. Supreme Court and other Appellate Courts,” Trump said in a statement.
If he is confirmed, Gaetz would not be running the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department. That would fall to Blanche as deputy attorney general. He would also advise the attorney general on policy priorities and other key issues.
The solicitor general argues the government’s cases before the Supreme Court.
Trump has been rapidly filling the positions with Washington outsiders since his convincing election Nov. 5. However, Gaetz’s nomination to the country’s top lawyer is perhaps the most surprising as the subject of a House ethics investigation for allegedly using illegal drugs and paying a friend to bring him a minor for sex.
In early 2023, after the Republicans regained the House, Gaetz was the single no vote on 15 ballots that kept Kevin McCarthy from being elected to House speaker, as McCarthy said, Gaetz wanted him to quash the investigation and McCarthy refused.
McCarthy was eventually chosen for the post after four days of backroom wrangling.
“I’ll give you the truth why I’m not speaker. It’s because one person, a member of Congress, wanted me to stop an ethics complaint because he slept with a 17-year old,” McCarthy alleged during a 2023 interview on C-SPAN. “An ethics complaint that started before I ever became speaker. And that’s illegal and I’m not going to get in the middle. Did he do it or not? I don’t know. But Ethics is looking at it. There’s other people in jail because of it.”
Following his nomination, Gaetz resigned from the House, effectively ending the ethics probe, but critics of the firebrand from Florida have called for the results to be made public before he is appointed as the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Senate Democrat and Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin called upon the House Ethics Committee to “preserve and share their report and all relevant documentation” on Gaetz with the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“We cannot allow this valuable information from a bipartisan investigation to be hidden from the American people,” Durbin continued. “Make no mistake: this information could be relevant to the question of Mr. Gaetz’s confirmation as the next Attorney General of the United States.”
A friend of Gaetz, Joel Greenburg, has admitted to having sex with the underage girl and has said Gaetz paid Greenberg to bring the girl to him. Despite efforts by the GOP to quiet the storm surrounding the issue, Democrats said Gaetz’s alleged sex trafficking and drug use will be front and center during the confirmation process.
“Mr. Gaetz’s likely nomination as attorney general is a perverse development in a truly dark series of events,” tweeted John Clune, the lawyer representing the underage victim. “We would support the House Ethics Committee immediately releasing their report. She was a high school student and there were witnesses.”
Gaetz has denied wrongdoing.
