When he was the Justice Department’s No. 2 official, Todd Blanche ejected his subordinate Ed Martin, then the leader of the agency’s “anti-weaponization” task force, from offices on the fourth floor at headquarters to a satellite site an 18-minute Uber ride across town.

Mr. Blanche had long complained that Mr. Martin, whose demands for retribution tracked closely with President Trump’s own calls for vengeance, spent too much of his time taunting his targets, and too little time knuckling down to conduct effective investigations, Mr. Blanche told people in his orbit when he made the move in February.

Many people inside the department, and even some critics of Mr. Blanche on the outside, viewed the Martin episode as a modest victory for normalcy. It seemed to feed into a narrative, which flourished and faded in the early days of the administration, that Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor, would at least try to mitigate Mr. Trump’s excesses and caprices.

“There was a belief among career Justice Department lawyers that Todd Blanche was going to save us,” Liz Oyer, who was ousted as the department’s pardon attorney by Mr. Blanche last year, wrote in a recent post on Substack.

That was a major misreading, Ms. Oyer now says. “It’s hard to even describe how bad things got,” she added in the post, reflecting a widely held view not just among critics of Mr. Trump but among career officials inside the department.

Mr. Blanche, elevated to acting attorney general in April when Mr. Trump fired Pam Bondi, promoted an expansive view of executive power as Mr. Trump’s defense lawyer in three of the criminal cases against him, a perspective that remains his lodestar. An attorney general is obligated under Article II of the Constitution to comply with a president’s lawful demands, he has argued.