John Brennan, who once ran the Central Intelligence Agency and now apparently serves as an adjunct professor of hypothetical syllabi, told MS NOW on Monday that future law students will study the Trump-Blanche Justice Department the way medical students study botched surgeries. Not as a model. As a cautionary exhibit.
He is, characteristically, both right and insufficiently precise. The corruption Brennan gestures at is not a personality flaw in Todd Blanche. It is a structural phenomenon, and the literature on institutional capture is quite clear on this point. What we are watching is the migration of a personal defense attorney into the office of the attorney general, carrying with him the epistemic habits of his former role, and meeting no institutional friction sufficient to slow the transition.
Consider the timeline, which is its own kind of curriculum. Blanche defended Trump in the hush-money trial, the classified documents case, and the election obstruction matter. In November 2024, Trump nominated him for deputy attorney general. The Senate confirmed him in March 2025. By April 2026, he was acting attorney general. On August 8, 2026, the Senate confirmed him again. The man who once argued that his client was above the law now administers the law. The Senate confirmed this twice. That is not a scandal. That is a system performing exactly as its incentives dictate.
The Justice Connection’s fact sheet, which compiles publicly reported actions, reads less like a rap sheet than like a syllabus for the very course Brennan imagines. A top aide told all 93 U.S. Attorney’s Offices that Trump was their “chief client.” Blanche boasted at CPAC that he had fired more than 200 prosecutors who worked on cases involving Trump. He signed a court motion that mimicked Trump’s rhetorical style, complete with accusations of “TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” He signed an addendum barring the IRS from auditing Trump, his family, and his company. He refused, despite a court order, to formalize the cancellation of a fund a federal judge later called collusive. A federal judge described his congressional testimony as “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous” and sent disciplinary referrals to state bars.
More than 20,000 DOJ employees have left. A quarter of the attorneys are gone. He disbanded the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Unit while holding crypto assets. He banned DOJ employees from participating in American Bar Association events. A senior advisor in his office was captured on footage encouraging rioters to “kill” officers.
Brennan’s framing, that Blanche “is still acting very much like a criminal defense lawyer,” is the kind of observation that is technically accurate and theoretically thin. The problem is not that Blanche failed to shed old habits. The problem is that the confirmation process, the ethics apparatus, the bar associations, and the federal judiciary collectively lacked the tools to compel a distinction between representing Donald Trump the man and representing the United States of America the sovereign. The distinction Brennan wants law schools to teach already exists in the professional responsibility canon. It was simply unenforceable against someone whose client appointed him, whose Senate confirmed him, and whose party applauded him for it.
Law schools will indeed teach this. They will teach it the way they teach the Saturday Night Massacre and the Teapot Dome scandal. Not because the legal profession failed to know better, but because knowing better has never been the operative variable. The operative variable is whether anyone with institutional authority is willing to pay the cost of enforcement. On that question, the 2026 record is unambiguous.