New attorney general, same albatross: Trump’s quest for retribution.

Attorney General Pam Bondi makes remarks in the briefing room at the White House in Washington, June 27, 2025. The name atop the Justice Department’s organizational chart matters less than the presence of a president whose demands for revenge have become so extreme that even his most obsequious appointees have fallen short. (Pete Marovich/The New York Times)

By ALAN FEUER and GLENN THRUSH

President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Pam Bondi will face the same conundrum that every attorney general he has hired and fired has confronted: It is hard to steer the Justice Department when the president is grabbing the wheel and stepping on the gas.

Trump is searching for a tougher version of Bondi, but the fault lies not in the shirking weakness of those he has called upon to execute his will, but rather in the impossibility of his request: to bring criminal charges against political targets with little to no evidence or legal justification.

The president has settled for the moment on Bondi’s chief deputy and his former defense lawyer, Todd Blanche, whose grasp of legal matters and low-key personality represent a contrast from the voluble, less lawyerly Bondi.

Yet the name atop the Justice Department’s organizational chart matters less than the overbearing presence of a president whose demands for retribution against his enemies have become so frequent and extreme that even his most obsequious appointees have fallen short.

“It’s certainly not about the willingness or the loyalty of any one person to carry out the president’s orders,” said Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor who is writing a book about the current state of the Justice Department. “It’s more that there are limits on the president — courts, grand juries, lawyers and investigators who understand norms and ethics — that have started getting in his way.”

Over the past few months, those limits have become more visible as the legal system has pushed back in an extraordinary manner against the president’s attempts to investigate and prosecute his enemies, no matter how much — or rather, little — evidence exists to support the cases. Judges, grand juries and some federal prosecutors have stepped in to block Trump’s most egregious efforts, serving as a bulwark against his maximalist personal and political goals.

It remains unclear for now how long Blanche, 51, might stay in his new job as acting attorney general — or who is likely to replace him. One senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, described the job as Blanche’s to lose.

Several other names have been floated in recent days, including Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency; Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah; and Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla. But it is unclear how serious any of these candidates might be, given Trump’s habit of musing with his associates about potential personnel moves.

Bondi had tried to redirect some of the president’s anger by blaming local federal prosecutors who have, in several important cases, declined to quickly indict those he had singled out as criminals.

At a reception for U.S. attorneys last December, Trump berated the top federal prosecutor in Maryland, Kelly O. Hayes, for not indicting Sen. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif. and an outspoken critic, for mortgage fraud, as Bondi and stunned officials looked on, according to a person who attended the event.

Bondi and Blanche got the president’s message, stepping up efforts to investigate several other Trump targets, including the Democratic fundraising group ActBlue; John O. Brennan, the former CIA director; and Cassidy Hutchinson, whom the president has accused of lying about his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, according to two officials briefed on the effort.

But more aggression in the courts is unlikely to solve the problem that Trump and his supporters are actually facing: that the cases he has asked for — and the people he has chosen to go after — are not, on the basis of the facts and law, targets for viable prosecution.

Blanche, who represented Trump in three of the four criminal cases he faced while out of office, at least comes to the job of leading the department with an advantage that Bondi and most of the other candidates never had: strong ties to the president forged during their shared time in the courtroom. The cases drew the men together in a bond based on a mutual feeling that Trump had been wronged by the Justice Department during the Biden administration.

Still, even Blanche, who has often claimed to have witnessed firsthand how the law was “weaponized” against the president, may not be able to deliver in the end on Trump’s desire to go after those he believes went after him.

Under Blanche, the Justice Department has already failed to win cases against two of Trump’s most reviled adversaries, former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. Those cases died in November when a federal judge determined that Lindsey Halligan, the inexperienced loyalist who was hand-picked by the president to bring charges, was put into her job unlawfully.

The department also failed on Blanche’s watch to secure an indictment against six Democratic lawmakers who made a video last year reminding military and intelligence personnel of their obligations to disobey illegal orders. Around the same time, prosecutors were unable to move forward with making a case against former President Joe Biden and aides over allegations that they had broken the law by using the autopen to sign presidential documents

In yet another unusual move, Judge James E. Boasberg, the chief federal judge in Washington, threw a significant roadblock last month into an investigation into Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, over claims that there were overruns in the central bank’s renovations of its headquarters. Boasberg determined that prosecutors had issued subpoenas to the Fed for no other reason than to harass Powell, who had long run afoul of Trump for not dropping interest rates, more or less at the president’s request.

Before Trump began demanding that the Justice Department file cases against his enemies, grand juries rarely rejected efforts to secure indictments, and prosecutors could go through long careers without experiencing the embarrassment of failing to get charges.

But under Trump, such failures have become more common — so common, in fact, that last month, Boasberg issued a remarkable standing order directing grand jury forepersons to alert the court if they rejected an indictment in what is known as a no true bill.