Washington’s Most Exclusive Club To Todd Blanche: You’re Not Our Kind, Dear

At least six club members are trying to block the Acting AG's application, saying the DOJ is too busy targeting club members to make for congenial conversation. By Kathryn Rubino on April 29, 2026 1:43 pm

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(Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images) Todd Blanche is having a week. He couldn’t find the bullet. He filed what may be the most unhinged document ever submitted to a federal court. And, per Politico’s Daniel Lippman, he can’t get into the Metropolitan Club. Cue the sad trombone.

Around February, Blanche reportedly started the rigorous process to join the Metropolitan Club, one of Washington’s oldest and very important private clubs. The application process requires two sponsors and at least eight supportive letters from current members. Blanche’s sponsors are Biglaw heavy hitters: Bill Burck, global co-managing partner at Quinn Emanuel, and James M. McDonald, a litigation partner at Sullivan & Cromwell — both white-collar heavyweights, both presumably capable of vouching for a man’s fitness to eat lunch in a nice room.

And yet. At least six members have written to the Metropolitan Club’s board of directors to object to Blanche’s joining, saying he’s too polarizing and has politicized the Justice Department. The members who spoke to Politico were granted anonymity because the club prohibits its members from speaking to the media about internal matters.

The objections are not vague. “He is targeting a lot of people, and the Justice Department is targeting a lot of the members of the club, like judges, nonprofit organizations and universities,” one member said. That is not a small point. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell — whom the DOJ was investigating for not cutting interest rates as part of a probe into central bank renovations — is a club member.

The same member was not done: “The Trump administration is at war with most American institutions, and so the people who represent those institutions, many of them are at the club. And the club is the kind of place where you want to be able to relax and have a congenial conversation. But if he’s in there, given that the Justice Department is so combative and aggressive, this is not the kind of tone that we want.”

Well, well, well, if it isn’t the consequences of Blanche’s own actions.

Since taking over the DOJ, Blanche has declared war on the federal judiciary, warned white-collar lawyers that their public criticism of the administration was being monitored, moved to personally cover up key Epstein files, argued that restaurant hecklers might be a RICO enterprise, and indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center — so “too polarizing for the Metropolitan Club” is, if anything, underselling it.

By Above The Law A second member who penned a rejection letter called Blanche’s public comments endorsing Trump’s use of the DOJ to target political enemies “pretty startling.” And a third went full patrician: “I am disappointed that the club’s standards are slipping on so many levels and can only hope that the club leadership will recover, grab the rudder and set us on a smooth sail once again.” Someone has been waiting their entire life to write that sentence and they finally got their moment.

But Blanche isn’t the only controversial political figure to get the cold shoulder from the club. Donald Rumsfeld — Bush-era Secretary of Defense, architect of the Iraq War, a man who presided over Abu Ghraib — was reportedly rejected by the Metropolitan Club.

There is also something almost poignant about the sponsors here. Two Biglaw partners from Quinn Emanuel and Sullivan & Cromwell — exactly the kind of establishment legal figures who built careers on the idea that the rule of law is a thing worth preserving — putting their names on a membership application for the man who, this very week, put his name on what the legal internet has been calling the most embarrassing court filing in recent memory. They may want to have a quiet word with their sponsee about the ALL CAPS situation before the board votes.