Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has been running the Department of Justice for fifty-three days. Pam Bondi was fired on April 2 over reporting on her handling of the Epstein files; Blanche took the acting role the same day under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act's 210-day clock. [1] The clock runs out at the end of October. No permanent attorney general nominee has been announced. The Senate Judiciary Committee has received no nomination paperwork. The White House counsel's office has briefed reporters on no shortlist that survived a news cycle. The Memorial Day Monday update is the absence — seven and a half weeks down, twenty-two and a half weeks remaining, no nomination, no withdrawal, no public timeline.
What the holdover has produced operationally is a docket. SDNY interim U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro's April 24 close of the Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell criminal investigation remains the most consequential single Blanche-era DOJ decision. Blanche himself led the administration's institutional posture on the WHCA dinner shooting from the April 26 Meet the Press platform. The DOJ-internal review of the Pentagon retaliation memo, the Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao paired vacancy, the Connolly Lebanon-paramedic file, the Markey FCC correspondence, and the pending litigation calendar in the Eleventh Circuit have all moved through Blanche's office without a confirmed AG signature at the bottom. Florida federal Judge Aileen Cannon's docket — including post-trial motions filed during the holdover period — is one of the pending judicial files that have not produced public Blanche-era DOJ comment. [2]
The structural argument the paper has carried in its war-authorization-legitimacy thread is that "acting" is the operating prefix on the second-Trump-administration DOJ — not a transition note. The Memorial Day Monday refinement is that the 210-day clock is now itself a structural artifact rather than a deadline. The administration is not running against it; it is running through it. Whether the next vacancy expiration (Cao on Navy is at a similar count) produces the first forced nomination event is the next watch item. Fifty-three days down, an empty Senate paperwork tray, and a fuller docket every Monday.
-- SAMUEL CRANE, Washington