Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance — who served as the U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama — says Congress should move to impeach and remove two of President Trump's most senior officials, arguing their conduct in office more than warrants it. Writing in her Substack after the Democrats' big midterm win, Vance lays out the party's new leverage over the White House — and names Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Attorney General Todd Blanche as the officials who should be removed from office. “That can’t happen soon enough,” she writes.

Senate Democrats, she argues, are well placed to stop the president from putting unqualified federal judges on the bench — Supreme Court justices above all. “There will be no Justice Cannon or Justice Kacsmaryk under this arrangement,” she writes — a reference to Aileen Cannon and Matthew Kacsmaryk, federal judges appointed by Trump whose handling of the classified-documents case and a challenge to the abortion pill mifepristone drew intense public scrutiny.

Congress, she continues, has the means to put the brakes on presidential overreach by having the Article I branch of government wield the power of the purse. With oversight hearings and an insistence on answers, lawmakers can restore a measure of accountability.

Vance is particularly hard on Blanche, charging him with an “unconscionable breach of the public trust while voting was in progress.” Citing Glenn Thrush at The New York Times, she points to a report that the Justice Department is ratcheting up its probe into the recruitment of an opponent bearing the same name as a Republican senator in Alaska. According to two people with knowledge of the move, some 20 Democrats have been sent letters letting them know they could be targets.

A “target,” she explains, is a person against whom the prosecutor or grand jury has substantial evidence of a crime and whom the prosecutor deems a putative defendant — put simply, someone prosecutors intend to indict in most instances. If the letters are what they seem, their dispatch suggests the Justice Department is ready to go after as many as 20 people in connection with the Alaska Senate race.

As for Blanche, Vance writes that he has a history of letting prosecutors pursue charges without sufficient evidence to prove guilt. She points to the third attempt to prosecute James Comey, the former FBI director, and the unsuccessful effort to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide, whose case a grand jury rejected.

The timing of the letters, she argues, made matters worse. The complaint lands against a long-standing norm inside the Justice Department, whose own policy guidance cautions prosecutors against taking overt investigative steps in the period just before an election, out of concern that enforcement could influence its outcome. No urgency justified making such a move on Election Day, Vance writes, when prosecutors could have waited until voting was over. In her view, removing Blanche would let Congress push back against the White House’s use of prosecutions against its enemies.

That would require more than a Senate majority. The House can impeach by a majority vote, but conviction requires two-thirds of senators present, and conviction results in removal from office. The bar is historically steep: no Cabinet secretary has ever been removed through impeachment, and the Senate has convicted just eight officials in U.S. history — all of them federal judges. The only Cabinet officer ever impeached, War Secretary William Belknap, resigned before the Senate tried and acquitted him in 1876.