Trump seeks new attorney general: these are the top candidates

Donald Trump is on the hunt for his next attorney general. After firing Pam Bondi on April 2, the president is now shuffling names to fill one of the most important cabinet posts, but also one he has clashed with in both his first and second terms.

After a few months of attrition due to his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case documents and some noisy congressional hearings, Bondi left the Department of Justice (DOJ) on better terms than his predecessors. BothJeff Sessions and William Bill Barr, the attorneys general of the first Trump administration, left the government not exactly on good terms with the president.

With Bondi gone, the weight of the position temporarily fell on the shoulders of Todd Blanche, who was serving as undersecretary at DOJ. However, the question still hangs in the air: Who will be the next attorney general These are the leading candidates.

Todd Blanche

The acting attorney general is one of the strongest choices to keep the job. While he has known Trump relatively recently, hedemonstrated loyalty even before he had him in front of him.

Before working for Trump, the 51-year-old lawyer worked at the prestigious law firmCadwalader, Wickersham & Taft. He also defended Paul Manafort, Trump's campaign manager during June and August 2016.

While the firm's partners approved of Blanche's having Manafort as a client, they voted against Trump. Not content with this, Blanche decided to resign his post to take on his new client.

"The firm's leaders were stunned. They wanted him to stay for a few months to transition his other cases, but Blanche said he was going to be appearing in court with Trump in three days. That expedited his departure. Some of Blanche's friends told him they, too, were shocked and angry that he would work for Trump. He told them it was hard to turn down an opportunity to represent a former president of the United States," reads the book '2024: How Trump Retook the White House and the Democrats Lost America', written by journalists Josh Dawley, Tyler Pager and Isaac Arnsdorf.

Blanche thus ended up defending Trump in three of the four criminal cases he faced between 2023 and 2024. He joined the DOJ in March 2025 as the second-in-command and currently holds the position of attorney general on an interim basis.

Lee Zeldin

Another name that has gained traction is that of Lee Zeldin, current administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). According to the New York Times, Trump has been evaluating Zeldin as attorney general even before firing Bondi.

The 46-year-old lawyer spent eight years as a member of the House of Representatives for New York's 1st District. In 2022 he was the Republican nominee for governor of the state and ended up making an election that exceeded the expectations of many, finishing just eight percentage points behind Kathy Hochul. It was the best election for a Republican in twenty years, following George Pataki's victory in 2002.

That campaign led him to be considered as a possible chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), although he ultimately decided not to go for the position, which then belonged to Ronna McDaniel.

At the helm of the EPA, he finds himself leading an agenda that combines deregulation with more focused environmental enforcement.

Harmeet Dhillon

According to Politico, Harmeet Dhillon would also be in the discussion to fill Bondi's seat. The veteran Republican lawyer currently heads the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

She was born in India into a conservative Sikh family. She lived in London and North Carolina before coming to San Francisco, where she later became chairwoman of the local Republican Party. In 2023, she tried unsuccessfully to defeat Ronna McDaniel to become chair of the RNC. At the time, she was supported by Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA.

As for her private experience, she worked at several firms and even for Judge Paul Niemeyer before founding her own firm in 2006, called Dhillon Law Group Inc.

According to the aforementioned media outlet, one of his highest points is coincidentally one heavily weighted by Trump: skill in front of the camera. "Dhillon has also been one of the most visible faces in Trump’s Justice Department, frequently appearing on TV and podcasts to tout her office’s work, most notably the sprawling prosecution of the anti-ICE protesters who disrupted a church service in St. Paul earlier this year," noted Politico.

Other options

Although Blanche, Zeldin and Dhillon are the strongest options to keep the attorney general position, there are other names that have hovered over the discussion. Among them are Mike Lee, senator from Utah, Eric Schmitt, senator from Missouri, and Jeanine Pirro, federal prosecutor in Washington DC.