| Todd Blanche doubled down on the Justice Department’s work under the second Trump administration in his confirmation hearing today before the Senate Judiciary Committee. |
| “We are keeping America safe, and we are just getting started,” he promised/threatened in his opening statement. |
| Blanche’s testimony today made clear that the question before the committee — and, if the nomination gets voted out of committee, the full Senate — is a relatively straightforward one. At bottom, the nomination is a referendum on the Trump Justice Department, and a vote to confirm Blanche is a vote to endorse the department’s work over the last 18 months — the abuses, the false claims, the attacks on the judiciary, the incompetence, and the politicization. |
| Blanche largely confirmed what we already knew about him, for better and worse. He has no problem following Trump’s orders, and he apparently regrets nothing that he or anyone else at the department has done under his watch. |
| Here are some takeaways from the hearing. |
| 1. John Cornyn Is Still Undecided |
| Texas Republican Cornyn used his time to ask Blanche about the supposed “anti-weaponization fund” that caused an uproar when it was first announced by Blanche. |
| Cornyn zeroed in on the fact that the settlement agreement contains a provision that states that the agreement can “be modified only with the written agreement” of the parties, and he suggested that Blanche’s various assurances that the fund is dead may therefore be insufficient. |
| Blanche struggled through these questions, though he could have put this issue to bed weeks ago — either by committing in writing to ending the fund, as he was asked and refused to do in a hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, or by submitting the declaration that was ordered by a judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, which he also refused to do. |
| On Monday, the federal judge who presided over the case issued a scathing opinion that effectively concluded that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was a sham and a fraud on the court and that criticized Blanche’s prior testimony to Congress on the subject as “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.” |
| In another time, this episode alone — settling a sham lawsuit in order to provide a payout to people who tried to overturn an election and misleading both Congress and the courts about it — would have been fatal to Blanche’s nomination. |
| 2. Thom Tillis Is On Board |
| Tillis, the retiring Republican from North Carolina, made clear today that he supports Blanche’s nomination despite previously expressing concerns about elevating people who supported those who attacked law enforcement officers on Jan. 6. The fact that Blanche had publicly cheered Trump’s pardon of all of the Jan. 6 defendants did not move him. |
| It may have helped that Blanche misrepresented what he actually said — something he does with unfortunate regularity. When Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse pressed him on his prior comments at CPAC about the pardon, Blanche claimed that he was simply talking “about what President Trump did” and that he was “not celebrating that. It is a fact.” |
| This is not true. |
| Blanche was specifically — and positively — citing the pardons as part of the work that the administration and the DOJ have done since Trump’s inauguration to bring “justice” to the American people in response to the Trump prosecutions. The question he was responding to wasn’t even about the pardons. Here’s the video. |
| 3. Blanche Continues to Misrepresent Facts on the Epstein Files |
| Blanche made two claims about the release of the Epstein files that were false. |
| First, he claimed that the department had been “prohibited by law” from producing any material from the DOJ’s investigative files, but this is not true. There is a legal prohibition on disclosing grand jury materials, and there are privacy laws that govern government disclosures involving third parties, but the vast majority of the material in the government’s possession was not grand jury material, and the government could always have redacted material concerning individuals. |
| Second, Blanche said that President Trump had “said from day one” to release the files. As anyone whose memory stretches all the way back to last year may recall, this is not true. |
| 4. Blanche Evaded a Question on Sending Federal Law Enforcement Officials to the Polls |
| Democrat Amy Klobuchar asked Blanche whether he would comply with the law that prohibits sending armed law enforcement to polls, but he managed to get out from under this question simply by telling her, vaguely, “We’ll follow the law.” |
| It was fortunate for Blanche that this worked, since he struck a very different tone at CPAC. |
| “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?” he said at the time. “Illegals can’t vote.” |
| No one on the Democratic side of the aisle appeared to have been aware of this remark. |
| 5. Democrats Missed Other Opportunities to Press Blanche |
| The political impact of aggressive questioning in a context like this — where Republicans have already largely fallen in line with Trump — may be limited, but it was odd to see Democrats miss very obvious lines of inquiry. |
| Blanche, for instance, has said that there is “a ton of evidence that the [2020] election was rigged.” Ranking Democrat Dick Durbin mentioned this at one point, but someone could simply have pulled that video up and asked Blanche to describe the “evidence” that he was referring to and then keep pushing him on it. |
| It’s hard to believe that a competent line of questioning like that would’ve been unsuccessful, since the claim that there’s “a ton of evidence” that the election “was rigged” is a lie. |
| 6. Blanche Was Rude |
| As I wrote on Sunday, Blanche does not handle difficult questions well — something we saw repeatedly during the hearing. |
| “That’s an extraordinarily obnoxious question, Senator,” he said to Whitehouse at one point. |
| “He’s allowed to lie,” he added. “Almost everything he just said is absolutely false.” |
| “I can answer the question or you can just interrupt me, Senator,” he said to Democrat Richard Blumenthal. |
| “I definitely did not say that, but nice try,” he shot back in response to questioning from Democrat Alex Padilla. |
| It’s small in the grand scheme of things, but it used to be the case that the nation’s top law enforcement official was expected to show some respect and decorum at a hearing like this, even with members of the other party. |
| 7. The Nomination Is Still Up in the Air |
| Even if Cornyn votes to move Blanche out of the committee, Blanche still has a narrow margin to work with among the full Senate Republican conference, and it remains unclear whether Republican senators Bill Cassidy, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins would ultimately vote for him. |
