Attorney General Todd Blanche and other senior Justice Department appointees can now join political campaigns in a personal capacity under a new DOJ memo rolling back Biden-era restrictions.
Assistant Attorney General Jolene Ann Laurie sent the guidance this week. It relaxes ethics limits on presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed Justice Department officials, CBS News reported.
Those officials may speak at rallies, canvass for votes, and serve as delegates or officers of a national political party. The work must stay in their personal capacities. The memo covers the attorney general, the deputy attorney general, assistant attorneys general, the FBI director, U.S. attorneys, and other Senate-confirmed appointees.
They are exempt from tighter rules that still bind other DOJ employees, including administrative law judges and staff in the Criminal Division. Career prosecutors remain under the stricter limits. Political appointees do not.
A 2024 Justice Department memo under President Biden took the opposite approach. It continued a policy put in place two years earlier and clamped down hard on non-career appointees.
That earlier guidance stated the ban in plain terms.
The 2024 memo declared:
"Non-career appointees may not attend any partisan political events, even in their personal capacities,"
It also told appointees to “avoid making public appearances in any state shortly before a primary or general election in that state, to the greatest extent practicable.” In practice, senior political appointees were told to stay home from ordinary party politics even on their own time.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi later eased those limits. Her change allowed political appointees to attend rallies and fundraisers. Laurie’s memo goes further. It opens the door to active campaign work and party office, still tied to personal capacity.
That sequence matches a broader pattern at the department under the current administration, including a separate move in which the Justice Department ended enforcement of 1934 gun rules after a Texas court strike-down.
Attorney General Todd Blanche addressed the Republican midterm convention in September. He also attended a rally for a Republican Senate candidate in North Carolina. Critics said those steps broke long-standing Justice Department norms meant to keep politics separate from law enforcement.
Blanche rejected the charge. He said the appearances were personal, not official.
Blanche stated:
"I am not in any way violating any rule or law,"
PBS News was first to report the new guidelines. The Laurie memo now puts the department’s written rules closer to the line Blanche already described. Senate-confirmed appointees get clear room for personal political work. The stricter cage stays on career components.
Blanche has also been in the middle of other high-profile charging fights, including when AG Blanche backed Pirro on the Reflecting Pool case even as President Trump publicly fumed over dropped charges.
The memo does not erase every ethics rule. It draws a line between official power and private political activity. Appointees may canvass, speak, and hold party posts on their own time. They remain barred from turning the Justice Department itself into a campaign arm.
That distinction matters. Political appointees serve at the pleasure of a president chosen by voters. Career lawyers and judges inside the building do not. Biden-era guidance treated both groups as if off-duty partisan events were the same threat. Bondi’s partial rollback and Laurie’s wider memo reject that approach.
Confirmation fights around Blanche already showed how raw the politics around the department can get, including when Trump highlighted Murkowski’s Garland vote after she opposed Blanche’s confirmation.
The same department has kept a hard line on other enforcement priorities, such as when the Justice Department sued more jurisdictions over in-state tuition for illegal immigrants and pushed that campaign to 25 cases.
Laurie’s guidance does not revise criminal law or charging standards. It answers a narrower question: whether Senate-confirmed leaders may take part in ordinary campaign politics when they are not acting as the department. The written answer is now yes, in a personal capacity.
Political appointees are hired to carry out an elected agenda. Gagging them after hours never made the law more neutral. It only made the rules less honest.