A letter signed by more than 1,200 former Department of Justice employees is urging the Senate Judiciary Committee to reject Todd Blanche’s nomination as Attorney General.
The signatories include career prosecutors, FBI officials, and former U.S. Attorneys who served under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The letter was organised through The Justice Connection and takes a deliberately narrow focus rather than relitigating Blanche’s full record.
It concentrates specifically on what Blanche has done to the department’s career workforce and what that means for ordinary Americans those employees were tasked with protecting.
The numbers outlined in the letter are stark, putting the total DOJ employee exodus at approximately 16,000, a figure larger than the 10,000-lawyer government-wide estimate reported previously.
That higher figure includes non-attorney staff, with the letter stating that 21 percent of the department’s attorneys have exited under the current environment.
Career employees have been fired for “declining to initiate vindictive prosecutions,” for “working on cases the president didn’t like,” for being relatives of the president’s political enemies, and for “refusing to lie in court.”
The signatories are not speaking in abstractions but describing what they witnessed happening to former colleagues and to the institution they spent their careers building.
The letter’s most pointed argument draws on Blanche’s own biography, noting that he spent nearly a decade as a career DOJ prosecutor and took the same oath as those now opposing him.
“That oath now compels us to speak out against the nomination of Todd Blanche for Attorney General,” they write, “someone who took the same oath, but has utterly failed to abide by it.”
The letter closes by invoking John Adams’s principle of “a government of laws, not of men,” framing the rejection of Blanche as a matter of institutional preservation.
The signatories argue that Blanche is unfit to lead the department to which they dedicated their professional lives, and they are calling on the committee to act accordingly.
The letter arrives as senators face a consequential decision about whether to confirm a nominee that more than a thousand of the department’s own former professionals consider deeply unsuitable for the role.