Todd Blanche Took the White House Podium and Said Trump 'Has Every Right' to Weigh In on Prosecutions and to Berate the Justices. He Called the AI Warnings 'Nothing but an Effort to Influence the Midterms.'

Attorney General Todd Blanche stood in the Rose Garden on Tuesday and told reporters that President Donald Trump has the right to weigh in on prosecutorial decisions, that it was proper for the president to vent at the Supreme Court over its mail-ballot ruling, and that the Justice Department will press ahead with election-integrity investigations before the midterms regardless of what the justices said.

Blanche was the second Cabinet official to take the podium since press secretary Karoline Leavitt left late last month. Trump has said senior officials will rotate through the briefing room while he looks for a replacement, and named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as next in line. The unusual sight of the nation's top law enforcement officer running a White House political briefing drew immediate questions about the wall that has traditionally separated the department from the president.

Blanche did not pretend the wall was intact. "The president should be communicating to the American people about cases that are extraordinarily important to him," he said, adding that Trump "has every right" to tell the Court what he thinks and that "a democracy is about three branches of government." Trump on Monday called the Supreme Court's refusal to let the Postal Service screen mail ballots "horrible, highly political" and said the justices he appointed were "merely a shell of their original selves." Blanche said the president was "very frustrated" but that the administration would comply. "We're of course going to comply with the Supreme Court's decision, as we always do," he said. "That doesn't mean that we're not going to do everything in this administration that we can to make sure that there are free and fair elections."

He said the ruling "doesn't affect ongoing criminal investigations into illegal voting," and that the department has charged 11 people in the past ten days with illegal voting or fraudulent registration, has brought nearly four times as many noncitizen-voting cases in under two years as the previous administration did in four, and has hundreds more under investigation. Asked whether the federal government's role in the November election was unusual, he said: "The federal government is always involved in elections."

On artificial intelligence, Blanche accused Democrats of manufacturing an election issue. He suggested the recent risk reports from Anthropic, OpenAI and Google DeepMind, including accounts of rogue AI agents carrying out cyberattacks, had been timed to hurt Republicans, noting that "every Democrat senator suddenly races to a microphone" after months of silence. He called the alarm "nothing but an effort to influence the midterms," and said the department would prosecute crimes committed with AI but would not police the industry. "We're prosecutors, not regulators," he said.

The rest of the briefing was a recitation of enforcement numbers. Blanche said murder fell nearly 20% and violent crime nearly 10% in 2025, claiming "crime is the lowest it has been in modern history." He cited 4,260 arrests for alleged terrorist threats, more than 13,000 arrests in the Memphis surge, 160-plus COVID-fraud defendants and a 12-person child-care fraud case in Southern California. He declined to discuss the investigations of Anthony Fauci and Rep. Ilhan Omar or the Butler, Pennsylvania, assassination attempt, though he said the FBI has given the Senate new background material on Butler. He confirmed the "grand conspiracy" probe into Trump's perceived adversaries continues despite the resignation of prosecutor Joe diGenova.