Attorney General Todd Blanche expelled the Justice Department’s top national security official after the two men clashed over the pace of White House-led media leak investigations, according to senior administration officials.
National Security Division Assistant Attorney General John Eisenberg was ordered to resign after a difficult tenure in which Eisenberg quickly fell out of favor with the DOJ leadership team, the officials added. He is one of three Senate-confirmed DOJ leaders leaving this week after Democrats won the midterm elections.
Eisenberg frustrated Blanche by trying to rein in President Donald Trump’s demands to force journalists to testify before a grand jury about their sources in articles critical of the president, said the officials, who spoke anonymously about the internal deliberations.
Blanche and her team pressured Eisenberg to approve the highly unusual and aggressive move of subpoenaing journalists to disclose sources providing sensitive information — including New York Times reporters who wrote about the security concerns of the president’s plane, donated by Qatar.
In a series of investigations into leaks of government secrets, Eisenberg sought to ensure his division followed DOJ protocols that require additional information-gathering steps to determine the identity of sources before targeting journalists, the officials said.
Blanche and her aides believed that Eisenberg, a Yale law graduate who was considered a DOJ institutionalist, was not considering other workarounds that could have expedited the cases, one of the officials said.
Media freedom advocates have criticized the department’s efforts during Trump’s second term to obtain grand jury testimony and phone records from journalists.
The department ultimately withdrew the subpoenas for New York Times journalists in July following a hearing in which a federal judge rejected that approach. But other reporting on foreign relations, notably on Venezuela, that angered the White House also prompted Blanche to pressure Eisenberg to take bolder action on media leaks, the officials said.
Another person close to the Blanche-Eisenberg dynamic said progress in the leak cases was one of many frustrations the attorney general had with his national security chief. A bigger concern was Eisenberg’s lack of experience managing a large team, the person said.
Eisenberg, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a longtime national security professional, also disappointed Blanche in other cases and was never seen as a Trump loyalist like other DOJ political leaders, the senior officials added. He had been deputy counsel at the White House in the first Trump administration, then a partner at Kirkland & Ellis.
Media representatives for the DOJ and Eisenberg did not respond to requests for comment.
In announcing Eisenberg’s resignation as head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division on Friday, Blanche praised him on X for “strengthening our nation’s ability to confront threats, both foreign and domestic.”
Superior influence
Blanche and her former deputy Emil Bove entered the administration with a disdain for the NSD’s approach to counterintelligence and counterterrorism and quickly lost confidence in Eisenberg, the officials said.
Now a federal appeals judge, Bove made a habit of calling him “Eisenblock” behind his back, several officials said. Blanche briefly thought that was her real last name before continuing to use the nickname, they added.
Eisenberg further antagonized department leaders last year by pouring resources into continuing the division’s tradition of indicting foreign defendants such as computer hackers, despite the odds that the United States would one day be able to bring them to justice.
Blanche and Bove previously served as Trump’s defense attorneys facing NSD attorneys in criminal proceedings over the president’s handling of classified documents.
Eisenberg had overseen the NSD since mid-2025, during which time he lost considerable influence compared to previous administrations and suffered from heavy attrition of senior supervisors and lawyers.
The DOJ acknowledged in an April budget document that the division was facing “unprecedented” workforce constraints.
Many NSD lawyers left, in part because they were frustrated at being forced to spend their days reviewing Jeffrey Epstein documents last year, according to interviews with former division employees. These NSD veterans said they admired Eisenberg’s intellect, although some questioned his leadership abilities.
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