Todd Blanche, the sitting Deputy Attorney General (DAG) of the United States—and until recently, Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney—flew to Tallahassee last week for a two-day, in-person interview with Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for her integral role facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious sex trafficking of underage girls.

Reporters called the visit “odd,” “unusual,” and “striking.” But those descriptions don’t come close to capturing either the bizarreness of the visit or, more importantly, its impropriety.

It’s an indication of how corrupt the DOJ has gotten that we noticed the anomaly but don’t register the outrage.

For starters, Blanche’s junket wasn’t just odd. It was off-the-charts bizarre. Deputy Attorneys General do not interview witnesses; that’s what Assistant United States Attorneys and investigative agents do.

The DAG’s job is not investigative. It is managerial. It’s policy, supervision, and oversight. The DAG gives keynote speeches, fields crisis calls, and steers the department through complex interagency waters. Interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell? That’s not in the job description. It’s not even in the same building as the job description.

So what was Blanche doing with Ghislaine Maxwell?

That’s the question we should all be asking. Because unless the answer is “advancing the interests of the United States,” then he had no business being there.

In plain view, Blanche was leveraging his position as the second-highest official in the Department of Justice—and the power entrusted to him by the people—to betray their interest in favor of his true client, Donald Trump. He was operating as Trump’s personal emissary—part of an all-hands-on-deck effort by the Trump White House to contain the firestorm surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and whatever secrets might still burn beneath the surface.

The meeting was plainly a form of negotiation between Maxwell and Blanche—her information for the hope of the DOJ’s favorable treatment. According to multiple reports, Maxwell was granted some form of limited immunity in exchange for talking to Blanche. That’s valuable consideration—real legal benefit conferred in exchange for information. And the cost of that benefit is borne entirely by the American people, in the form of diminished ability to prosecute future crimes and weakened leverage over Maxwell herself. So again: what did the people of the United States get in return?

The answer, again, seems to be nothing. No new charges. No public disclosures. Just a possible card for Blanche or the DOJ to play to aid the personal political fortunes of the President.

And that brings us to the real issue here. Not just the meeting itself, but the nonchalant bastardization of the Justice Department’s mission from investigating and prosecuting crimes on behalf of the people, to political fixers on behalf of the President, with Blanche as fixer-in-chief. His conduct suggests he still sees himself as Trump’s lawyer—only now with the full power of the Justice Department behind him.

Like every other DOJ official, Blanche swore an oath to “well and faithfully discharge” the duties of his office. Longstanding authority, including DOJ internal guidance, makes clear that “faithfully” is a command to serve the public interest and not the interest of any individual, including the President. As former Attorney General Ben Civiletti put it, “The client of the Department of Justice is the people of the United States, not the President who appointed us.”

Blanche’s trip turned that principle on its head. Every aspect of it seemed aimed at shielding the President from the political damage of the Epstein scandal.

And Maxwell is obviously angling to barter her information for some reduction in sentence or even commutation. Again, Blanche is in the official position to make that happen only as an agent of the people of the United States, not a political operative for Trump. He has no business trading a public good for the private political benefit to Trump of a certain spin on the information.

Then consider the (unverified) report that Blanche was the only government representative at the interview—just him, Maxwell, and Maxwell’s attorney, David Markus, a personal acquaintance of Blanche’s. No accompanying FBI agent. No DOJ attorney. No line prosecutor. No formal record of the meeting. Not even a suggestion that Blanche memorialized the contents in a memo. Just a private, undocumented interview between the Deputy Attorney General and a convicted criminal who is sitting on information that could be politically damaging to Blanche’s former (and likely current) client: Donald J. Trump.

There is no benign explanation for this breach of the most basic protocol. Blanche served for eight years as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. Any prosecutor learns in their first week on the job that you can’t conduct an interview alone. If the reports are accurate, the likelier explanation is this: the meeting was kept secret to avoid political fallout or to prevent the creation of a record that might prove embarrassing. Except the information belongs to the American people—it’s gathered in their interest and used in their interest.

That interest looks increasingly compromised. The suspicion that Maxwell has damaging information about Trump—and that Blanche’s real role is to contain it—only deepens when we recall Trump’s own coded outreach. To be clear, there is no public evidence that Trump has participated in any criminal activity related to Epstein or Maxwell. But when Maxwell was arrested and charged with lurid crimes, Trump didn’t express outrage. He didn’t side with the victims. He said he “wished her well.”

Trump is a master of coded communication with convicts, and he doesn’t offer up that kind gesture accidentally (or sincerely). It’s his version of an outreach to someone whom he wants not to give dirt to investigators.

He executed a similar coded outreach to Michael Cohen, criticizing the search of his property as a “disgrace” and calling him and telling him to “stay strong.” Similarly, he’s sent unsubtle messages over the years to witnesses and co-defendants, such as praise for Roger Stone’s “guts,” sympathy for Paul Manafort’s suffering, even a public promise to “take care of” those who stay loyal. In that context, Blanche’s prison visit looks less like a DOJ fact-finding mission and more like a coded message to Maxwell: stay strong, you’re not forgotten.

The Department of Justice is not a private law firm. It doesn’t run errands. It doesn’t perform client service. It acts in accordance with the Constitution and longstanding norms, and on behalf of the American people as a whole. Or at least it used to.

None of this could possibly be lost on Blanche. A former AUSA and high-level defense attorney, he knows the rules of the road and the fundamental responsibility of DOJ to serve the public interest.

We’ve reached the point where the Department’s highest officials are violating the most fundamental principles of justice—casually, and without a trace of shame. When the #2 official at DOJ can openly act as the President’s political fixer—when the most sensitive facts in the most radioactive scandal of our time can be quietly gathered, shaped, or suppressed by the very people meant to investigate them—we’ve passed the guardrails of ordinary dysfunction.

We have a right to answers. And if we surrender it, if we chalk it up to just another “odd” episode in the Trump-era DOJ—we won’t just be surrendering accountability; we’ll be surrendering the idea that justice belongs to the people and accepting that Donald Trump is entitled to play by different rules. That’s not politics as usual; it’s the foundation of authoritarianism.

Harry Litman is a former United States Attorney and the executive producer and host of the Talking Feds podcast. He has taught law at UCLA, Berkeley, and Georgetown and served as a deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton Administration. Please consider subscribing to Talking Feds on Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.