President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he will nominate acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to serve in the role permanently.

“We are going to make him permanent attorney general,” Trump said during an event in the Rose Garden. A video of the announcement was posted to social media by a White House aide.

Trump appointed Blanche, a former personal lawyer to the president, to lead the Justice Department in an acting capacity after firing then-Attorney General Pam Bondi in April.

MS NOW reported the planned nomination earlier Wednesday, citing a senior administration official. CNN was the first to report the news.

When asked about Blanche’s anticipated nomination, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said, “President Trump has a great relationship with acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and is very pleased with the job he’s doing so far.”

“Todd Blanche is an American patriot who fearlessly fought against the Democrats’ unprecedented lawfare campaign on behalf of President Trump,” Jackson continued. “The President’s entire team at the Department of Justice is doing a great job advocating for sanity, law and order, and policies that keep Americans safe.”

In an interview on The New York Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast published earlier Wednesday, Trump was asked if he had decided whether Blanche would be attorney general.

“I think he will,” the president said.

When asked whether he had someone else in mind for the role, Trump said no and appeared to rule out nominating Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, though he called him “very good” and “a friend of mine.”

“I wanted to see how he’s received,” Trump said of Blanche. “You know, we put him as acting, and he’s done a very good job. But I’ve known him a long time.”

Blanche’s road to confirmation could be a rough one following the intense bipartisan blowback to Trump’s IRS settlement, which initially included a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that was expected to compensate participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and other Trump allies.

Two senior administration officials told MS NOW that Blanche has developed good relationships with GOP lawmakers on Capitol Hill that might help allay some confirmation issues he will inevitably face. But ultimately, they said, his confirmation may hinge on whether or not the weaponization fund is actually dropped.

Earlier this week, Blanche testified before a House Appropriations Committee panel that the Trump administration is “not moving forward with the fund. Period.” However, the rest of the Trump-IRS settlement remains intact, Blanche said, including the addendum granting Trump, his family and his businesses immunity from all existing IRS tax audits.

Bondi’s firing in April followed bipartisan backlash over the Justice Department’s handling of the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files under her leadership. During a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee last week as part of the GOP-led panel’s sprawling investigation into Epstein, Bondi appeared to shift the blame for the botched release to Blanche.

Though she admitted to “redaction errors,” according to her prepared opening remarks to the committee, she said she had “delegated oversight over this process” to Blanche, then deputy attorney general. Later that day, she praised “Blanche’s management of this Herculean task” in a post on social media and called his ethics “beyond reproach.”

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