Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was urged by the top Justice Department ethics lawyer to recuse himself from any legal cases connected to his former client, President Donald Trump, according to a new CNN report on Thursday.
Just after Blanche took on the role of deputy attorney general in March 2025, Joseph Tirrell gave Blanche and Emil Bove, his then top-deputy, "a printed PowerPoint presentation on ethics," a former senior DOJ ethics official told CNN.
This was the first time that Blanche was formally told he would need to remove himself from Trump-related cases — something that has not been reported before.
"Around the same time, the department’s top career lawyer advised that Bove potentially had a conflict of interest by being involved in firings of DOJ lawyers," CNN reported.
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