| Todd Blanche is a lawyer of many firsts — the first lawyer to lead a former president’s criminal defense team, the first attorney general to sign off on a sham settlement with the president, and the first attorney general to lie about there being “a ton of evidence” that an election was “rigged,” among other dubious achievements. |
| This week, Blanche appears to have made some history again when he served as the White House’s official press briefer on Tuesday. It was a 33-minute outdoor appearance that featured some of Blanche’s signature moves — factual misrepresentations, both large and small; purported statistics that make no sense if you think about them for more than 30 seconds; and spurious, partisan talking points aimed at the Democratic Party. |
| Plenty of attorneys general have appeared at the White House to brief the press on major law enforcement news, but so far as I can tell, this is the first time that an attorney general has served as the White House’s official spokesperson — something that even Pam Bondi didn’t do during her tenure. If you were looking for another visual metaphor for the end of the Justice Department’s independence from the White House under Donald Trump, this was it. |
| The questions for Blanche focused on the Justice Department and federal law enforcement, but that did not prevent him from veering far afield and repeatedly fumbling some basic facts. |
| Blanche claimed, for instance, that “most of Congress” has refused to characterize the war with Iran as a “war” and has concluded that “the president’s not doing anything wrong.” In fact, bipartisan majorities in Congress have repeatedly concluded that Trump’s war is illegal and insisted that he end the conflict. The House of Representatives did it again hours after Blanche’s appearance at the White House. |
| In defense of Trump’s attacks on his Supreme Court appointees this week, Blanche claimed that “members of Congress [and] the [Biden] administration came out basically threatening judges for months on end” after the Court overruled Roe v. Wade in 2022, but this never happened. The closest that a prominent Democrat has come to “threatening” any of the sitting justices was a comment from Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer in 2020, but that was years before Roe was overturned, and Schumer walked those comments back the next day. |
| Blanche touted an “arrest that just took place this morning.” It actually took place several days earlier. |
| Perhaps most surprisingly, Blanche claimed that the Justice Department had arrested “1,039 individuals [who were] prevented from carrying out alleged terrorist attacks,” which he described as a 38% increase over Joe Biden’s presidency. |
| The number makes no sense on its face unless you believe that the Trump administration has never publicized that it has foiled more than one terrorist plot a day since Trump’s return to office. I asked the Justice Department what the factual basis was for Blanche’s claim and if there was any way for someone outside of the Justice Department to verify it, but I did not get a response. |
| My best guess is that the figure relies on some combination of (1) characterizing gangs as terrorists; (2) characterizing ICE protesters as terrorists; (3) including defendants in the arrest figures even if they were later acquitted; and (4) using the words “prevented,” “carrying out,” “terrorist,” and “attacks” as loosely as possible. |
| These appear to be junk statistics — just like Blanche’s claim at the GOP’s midterm convention last week that under the Trump administration, “2.6 million criminal aliens who entered the country illegally and should never have been released into our neighborhoods are being swiftly removed.” That number is not accurate and appears to have been made up by innumerate anti-immigration activists. |
| Blanche offered subtler forms of political propaganda at this week’s briefing, as well. |
| “Under President Trump’s leadership,” Blanche said, “crime is the lowest it has been in modern history.” There is, however, very little reason to believe that the Trump Justice Department is responsible for this. |
| Blanche said that twelve daycare fraud defendants “were arrested this morning” in California and that they “were naturalized citizens from Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Iraq, and Somalia.” The arrests were actually last week, but setting that aside, what was the point of mentioning that these people were naturalized citizens except to imply that such citizens are more likely to commit fraud? It’s an empirically baseless suggestion. |
| When a reporter asked about the Justice Department’s “raid” to obtain voting records from Fulton County, Georgia, Blanche insisted that it was not a raid because “a judge authorized a search warrant based upon probable cause.” Never mind that the Trump DOJ has used the word “raid” to describe the exact same procedure that recovered the classified documents that Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago. |
| To cap it all off, Blanche described the timing of the debate over AI in Washington as “nothing but an effort to influence the midterms” by the Democrats. “I shouldn’t have to say that out loud,” he added. “Of course that’s what it is.” |
| Of course that’s exactly not what it is, but that is Trump’s line, and that means it is now Blanche’s line too. |
| The imitation game didn’t end there. Blanche made fun of the reporters for having to endure the heat outside, with the sort of semi-sadistic pleasure that Trump takes in mocking the press, but in Blanche’s case, the joke was both not funny and not worth repeating three different times in the course of half an hour. |
| This was yet another poor outing for Blanche, and it wasn’t even the only one this week. |
| During a separate and brief on-camera interview, a reporter for CBS asked Blanche for the evidence that mail-in balloting was more prone to fraud than in-person voting. The question was an obvious one given that the Justice Department has been litigating this issue for months, including in the Supreme Court in recent weeks, but Blanche’s answer was word salad. |
| This is not going to end anytime soon, and we may see even more of Blanche in the months to come. That is because the Trump administration’s record is so poor that it has been forced to campaign on the argument that Trump is responsible for a large drop in crime. |
| It’s hard to envision this effort gaining much traction, both because the claim is not supported by the available evidence and because Blanche is not a particularly appealing public figure. |
| The one upside, for Blanche at least, is that he might be able to use these appearances to improve his crowd work. |
