Mr. Blanche’s actions are meant to demonstrate progress on the president’s priorities, chief among them payback.
Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, is doing what he can, as quickly as he can, to shed the “acting” label.
Mr. Blanche, who ran the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department as the top deputy to his predecessor, Pam Bondi, before her unceremonious ouster this month, has long been a target of pro-Trump influencers who accuse him of slow-walking the prosecutions of President Trump’s enemies.
But now Mr. Blanche is striving to silence critics on the right with a conspicuous salvo of actions to demonstrate progress on the president’s priorities, among them payback against Mr. Trump’s adversaries.
At Mr. Blanche’s urging, the Justice Department is moving ahead with investigations into several high-profile targets — including John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director who helped investigate Russian interference in Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Beyond Mr. Brennan, current and former officials say, Mr. Blanche has also given the green light to inquiries into Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who outraged Mr. Trump four years ago after she implicated him in the violence that erupted at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021; the Democratic fund-raising organization ActBlue over documented discrepancies in its screening of overseas donors; and the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights nonprofit in Alabama that was indicted this week over a discontinued program that paid informants to infiltrate white supremacist and extremist groups.
Moreover, prosecutors plan to revive a botched attempt to bring charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, after a federal judge threw out charges last year that Mr. Comey had lied to Congress, the people said. It is not clear what they are investigating this time.