On the "Pod Force One" podcast, the attorney general said the Justice Department is not seeking to stop Omar from talking about the immigration fraud probe against her. He contrasted that with the gag orders imposed on Trump during his criminal cases.
Attorney General Todd Blanche says the Justice Department has no intention of restricting what Rep. Ilhan Omar says in public about the federal immigration fraud investigation into her. He argues that is more freedom than President Trump was given when he was a criminal defendant.
Blanche, who was Trump’s personal defense lawyer through the four criminal indictments the president faced during his 2024 campaign, made the comments on the New York Post podcast "Pod Force One" with host Miranda Devine. The interview was recorded on Oct. 14. He would not discuss the details of the Omar case.
Omar has said publicly that the government will not keep her quiet. Blanche said nobody is trying to. "There’s no effort by the Department of Justice, unlike the last Department of Justice that worked very hard to keep President Trump quiet by getting gag orders and the like – that’s not what we’re doing," he said.
The gag-order record
Former special counsel Jack Smith sought gag orders against Trump in both of his federal cases. He got one in the 2020 election interference case, but the judge overseeing the classified documents case turned the request down. Trump was also placed under gag orders during his civil fraud trial and his "hush money" criminal trial in Manhattan.
Blanche said Democrats are "gaslighting the American people" when they accuse the administration of weaponizing the Justice Department against the "Squad" member. He pointed to the department’s anti-weaponization task force and to New York’s attorney general, who he said "tried to destroy not only him, his family, his children, his business."
"I don’t think, I know, the American people see right through that," Blanche said.
"He loved it"
Asked how Trump coped with the prosecutions, Blanche said the president was "frustrated and mad and angry" but "never down." He recalled the booking in Atlanta, the only one of the four cases in which Trump had a mugshot taken. Blanche said his own first reaction was dread.
"But what happens? He loved it," Blanche said. "It became the whole campaign." What could have been the darkest day, he said, turned into "kind of a rallying cry" for Trump.
Homeland Security Investigations agents searched Omar’s Washington, D.C., home on Oct. 12 as part of the probe. Omar has denied any wrongdoing.
Reporting in this story is based on an interview first published by the New York Post. The photograph is a stock file image.
