A former lawyer for Donald Trump is sounding the alarm over what he calls a potential abuse of power at the Department of Justice, warning that the republic faces a serious threat if the incoming attorney general uses federal law enforcement to interfere with future elections.
Ty Cobb, who served as a White House lawyer during Trump's first term, told MSNBC that Americans should be deeply concerned about the possibility that Todd Blanche, Trump's pick for deputy attorney general, could be directed to use DOJ resources to tilt electoral outcomes. Cobb did not mince words about the stakes, as Common Dreams reported.
"If Trump is able to pressure Blanche into subverting elections, we're screwed."
The warning lands at a moment when the DOJ is already at the center of a bitter national debate over prosecutorial independence, political retaliation, and the boundaries of executive power.
Todd Blanche is no stranger to Trump's legal battles. He served as one of Trump's lead defense attorneys through some of the most consequential criminal proceedings in modern presidential history. Now Trump has tapped him for a top role at the very department that pursued those cases.
That trajectory has drawn sharp scrutiny from legal observers on both sides of the aisle. Cobb, a Republican who represented Trump during the Mueller investigation, framed the concern not as partisan sniping but as a structural warning about the separation between law enforcement and electoral politics.
The fear Cobb described is specific: that a loyalist attorney general or deputy attorney general could direct federal prosecutors, FBI agents, and investigative resources toward undermining political opponents or shielding allies from accountability during election cycles. That kind of interference, Cobb suggested, would represent a fundamental breach of DOJ norms that have held across administrations of both parties.
Cobb's warning arrives against a backdrop of escalating tensions between Trump's legal orbit and the Justice Department. The former president has spent years casting federal investigations into his conduct as politically motivated persecution, a message he has repeated in courtrooms and on the campaign trail alike.
When Trump pleaded not guilty to four felony counts in Washington, D.C., including conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, he framed the charges in blunt political terms.
"This is the persecution of the person that's leading by very, very substantial numbers in the Republican primary and leading Biden by a lot. So if you can't beat 'em, you persecute 'em or you prosecute 'em."
The most serious counts in that indictment carried potential sentences of up to 20 years in prison. U.S. Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya directed Trump not to communicate directly about case facts with known witnesses.
Trump's defense team waged an aggressive pretrial campaign to challenge the prosecution's foundation. His lawyers filed at least 59 demands for discovery materials, a sweeping set of requests that sought intelligence agency records about January 6 informants, foreign election interference documents, and Biden family communications, as the Washington Examiner detailed.
Among the most notable requests: all documents regarding "informants, cooperators, undercover agents, or anyone acting in a similar capacity on behalf or at the behest of the Department of Justice or any law enforcement agency" who were within five miles of the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump's defense attorneys argued the information was favorable to their client "because it suggests that there were adequate controls in place." Judge Tanya Chutkan, who oversaw the case, denied Trump's bid to subpoena lawmakers for January 6 committee archives, calling it a "fishing expedition."
Former special counsel Jack Smith, for his part, stood behind the case he built. In testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, Smith told lawmakers his team had developed "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" that Trump engaged in criminal activity, as Fox News reported.
The hearing grew contentious. Republican members, including Chairman Jim Jordan, challenged Smith over his use of secret subpoenas to obtain lawmakers' phone records. Smith defended the practice of obtaining tolling records, or phone logs, of Republican lawmakers as "common practice" in such investigations.
Smith also condemned the treatment of FBI agents and DOJ officials who worked on the special counsel investigations. Thousands of FBI personnel were forced to fill out questionnaires about their roles in January 6 investigations, with some subsequently fired.
"To vilify and seek retribution against these people is wrong."
The battle between Trump's legal team and Smith extended well beyond the courtroom. In the final days before the transition of power, Trump's attorneys mounted a last-ditch effort to block the release of Smith's two-volume closing report, which covered both the classified documents case and alleged 2020 election subversion efforts.
Blanche himself, along with co-counsel John Lauro, demanded that outgoing Attorney General Merrick Garland fire Smith before he resigned and block the report entirely. Their letter to Garland was direct: "Because Smith has proposed an unlawful course of action, you must countermand his plan and remove him promptly," as Just The News reported.
Trump's legal team argued that releasing the report would illegally interfere with the presidential transition and that the decision should rest with the incoming Trump administration. Attorneys for former co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira sought an emergency order from Judge Aileen Cannon to bar Smith from releasing the classified documents portion of the report.
Lawyers for Nauta and De Oliveira put it sharply: "Despite losing in court and having no valid appointment, Smith is determined to continue litigating this case in the court of public opinion."
Ty Cobb is not a Never-Trumper or a Democratic operative. He served inside the Trump White House. He navigated the Mueller investigation from the president's side of the table. That background makes his public warning harder to dismiss as partisan overreach.
His concern centers on a specific institutional danger: that a DOJ led by officials whose primary loyalty runs to a single political figure, rather than to the constitutional framework, could be turned into an instrument of electoral manipulation. The scenario he described is not about policy disagreements or personnel choices. It is about whether the nation's chief law enforcement apparatus can be directed to influence who wins and who loses elections.
Cobb did not allege that Blanche has already taken such steps. His warning was forward-looking and conditional. But the fact that a former Trump insider felt compelled to state the risk publicly reflects the depth of anxiety among legal professionals about the trajectory of DOJ independence.
The question Cobb raised is not abstract. Federal prosecutors hold enormous discretionary power: whom to investigate, whom to charge, whom to leave alone. That power, exercised selectively for electoral advantage, would represent a corruption of the justice system that transcends any single case or political figure.
Defenders of Trump's DOJ picks argue that the department has already been weaponized in the opposite direction, that Smith's prosecutions were themselves politically motivated, and that new leadership will restore balance rather than destroy it. That debate will play out in confirmation hearings, in courtrooms, and in the conduct of federal law enforcement over the coming years.
When a lawyer who once defended the president warns the country is in danger from the president's own appointees, the system is either correcting itself or fracturing. Which one depends entirely on whether the guardrails hold.
