Gambling a gilded career to defend Trump
Most of Manhattan lawyer’s work has been as prosecutor
Just over a year ago, Todd Blanche was a registered New York Democrat and a partner at Wall Street’s oldest law firm, where the nation’s corporate elite go for legal help. Now, he is a registered Florida Republican who runs his own firm, where the biggest client is a man famous and infamous for his legal troubles: Donald Trump.
Blanche recently bought a home in Palm Beach County near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. He brought his family to Trump’s campaign celebration there on Super Tuesday. And during Trump’s first criminal trial, set to begin Monday in Manhattan, he will use space at 40 Wall St., the former president’s office tower near the courthouse.
After a well-credentialed career as a federal prosecutor and a white-collar defense lawyer, Blanche, 49, has bet his professional future on representing Trump, the first former U.S. president to be indicted.
It was a striking career move — forfeiting a lucrative partnership to represent a man notorious for cycling through lawyers and ignoring their bills — that has baffled Blanche’s former colleagues at the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York.
Many have privately questioned, at social events and in informal alumni gatherings, why he would upend his life and risk his reputation for Trump, whose refusal to acknowledge his loss in the 2020 election has become a chasm in the U.S. political and legal systems. Many prominent lawyers have refused to represent the former president, they note, and three of Trump’s former lawyers are witnesses against him.
Blanche’s decision to defend Trump in three of his four criminal cases has pushed the lawyer outside his comfort zone. He developed a reputation as a skilled courtroom prosecutor — working in the same office as Alvin Bragg, now the Manhattan district attorney prosecuting Trump — but has far less experience at the defense table. Trump’s Manhattan case will be his second criminal trial as a defense lawyer, and one of his few state court engagements.
Despite the risks, Blanche has much to gain from Trump. No longer just a high-priced defense lawyer in a city full of them, Blanche is handling the country’s most significant criminal case, raising his profile and creating a question about whether a door would open for him in a second Trump administration.
He jokes about having his eye on an ambassadorship to Italy, friends say, although he often says he has no actual interest in a government job. Still, many assume he would welcome the chance to run his old office, the Southern District, a role that the agency’s alumni covet.
Some of his former Southern District colleagues have come to Blanche’s defense, noting that every defendant, no matter how polarizing, is entitled to capable counsel.
“I have heard from a good number of people in the SDNY who have said, ‘Why the heck would Todd do this, why would he ever take this case?’ ” said Elie Honig, the CNN senior legal analyst who worked with Blanche at the Southern District and speaks highly of him. “My response is, generally, when did we become pearl-clutchers about defense lawyers defending defendants?
“That’s what the job is and what our system requires.”
Blanche has his hands full. He is the lead counsel on Trump’s trial in Manhattan on charges that he covered up a sex scandal surrounding his 2016 presidential campaign, as well as the case in Fort Pierce, Florida, where he is charged under the Espionage Act over retaining sensitive government documents after he left office. Blanche is also a co-counsel in Trump’s federal case in Washington on charges that he conspired to defraud the United States with his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.
At the heart of the strategy used by Blanche and his colleagues is a favorite Trump tactic: stalling.
The defense team has sought to push the trials past Election Day, and Trump’s associates privately say they see it working. In the case brought by the Manhattan district attorney, the judge granted a three-week delay, although he rejected Blanche’s effort to postpone the case further.
Blanche, who is working on the Manhattan case with Susan Necheles, a veteran defense lawyer, is not a total newcomer to Trump’s world. In recent years, Blanche — with the blessing of his former law firm, Cadwalader — represented other Trump associates, including Paul Manafort, his onetime campaign chair, and Boris Ephsteyn, a roving adviser.
But when he proposed taking on Trump, the Cadwalader committee that handles reputational issues balked, people with knowledge of the matter said, and none of the firm’s leaders intervened on Blanche’s behalf. A spokesperson for the firm did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Blanche described the experience to friends as painful and politicized but told friends that he had been frustrated with a lack of autonomy at the huge firm and was ready to strike out on his own.
Last April, he founded Blanche Law in New York and began defending Trump.
Some of Blanche’s friends describe him as deeply loyal to the people he cares about and a true believer in the notion that Trump should not face trial in the Manhattan case. Blanche has a competitive streak — he has finished two Ironman races — but by Trump lawyer standards, he is nonconfrontational and soft-spoken. He also is uninterested in appearing on television, even though Trump often likes to see his lawyers on screen.
Many of the arguments that Blanche has raised on behalf of Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, echoed his client’s laments about his criminal cases. In filings and hearings, Blanche has painted a picture of the former president as the victim of partisan attacks from Democrats and has attacked the cases themselves as attempts to derail Trump’s campaign for the White House.
Blanche joined the Southern District in 1999 as a paralegal. He worked days and went to Brooklyn Law School at night, commuting from Long Island. Blanche conveyed a decidedly middle-class vibe at an office known for its Ivy League pedigree.
When he returned to the Southern District a few years later as a prosecutor, he focused largely on violent crime. Blanche ultimately became a co-leader of the Southern District’s violentcrimes unit.
As a violent-crimes prosecutor, he was responsible for handling a variety of unsavory cooperating witnesses, including drug dealers and murderers. That experience, his former colleagues said, showed a contrarian streak and an empathetic side that explains his decision to essentially put his career on the line for someone as divisive as Trump.