https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2026\/01\/16\/todd-blanche-trump-records-00732980<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Before Donald Trump made him second in command at the Justice Department, Todd Blanche was the president\u2019s most prominent defense attorney, shielding him from an avalanche of criminal cases that threatened to land him in jail for years.<\/p>\n
That loyalty led Trump to appoint Blanche as his designated representative to the National Archives, the keeper of White House records from the president\u2019s first term. Large swathes of those first-term records are slated to become publicly available next week, and under the Presidential Records Act, the president\u2019s designees play an outsized role in governing the public\u2019s access to those files.<\/p>\n
American Oversight, a prominent left-leaning government transparency group, is urging Blanche to relinquish his role as the gatekeeper to Trump\u2019s presidential records, saying his attorney-client relationship with the president \u2014 in addition to his role as deputy attorney general \u2014 presents a conflict. Anything less, the group argues, will erode public confidence in the process.” <\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.politico.com\/news\/2026\/01\/16\/todd-blanche-trump-records-00732980<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[951,818,350,221,2192,170],"class_list":["post-21161","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-article-share","tag-corruption","tag-department-of-justice","tag-doj","tag-donald-trump","tag-loyalty","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21161","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21161"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21162,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21161\/revisions\/21162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lonecandle.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}