There Is No Case for Todd Blanche

By Nick Catoggio

Wednesday, July 15, 2026

 

Unless you’re a leftist or Tucker Carlson, there was only ever one reason to consider voting for an unqualified miscreant like Graham Platner in Maine. Namely, as long as Republicans control the Senate, the president will remain almost entirely free to fill important federal vacancies with unqualified miscreants of his own.

 

And that will be true, it turns out, even when Senate Republicans have nothing to lose by stopping him.

 

Today was day one of Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee to become attorney general. As regular readers know, the stakes couldn’t have been lower: Because Blanche was confirmed as deputy AG last year, he’s eligible to serve as acting AG until the vacancy at the top of the Justice Department is filled. If Donald Trump wants him in charge until the end of his term, he can have that by simply declining to nominate anyone else to succeed Pam Bondi.

 

This is a rare case, in other words, when Senate Republicans can reject a nominee without causing any trouble for the president apart from momentary embarrassment.

 

They have the votes to do it, too—in theory. Thom Tillis and John Cornyn sit on the Judiciary Committee, are in their final months in office, and bear the president a grudge for his role in ending their careers. They can effectively kill Blanche’s nomination by joining Democratic members on the committee in voting no.

 

If they do advance him, the votes are potentially there to finish Blanche off in a vote of the full Senate given the GOP’s current three-vote majority. Bill Cassidy also belongs to the “grudge-bearing retiree” club, remember; Lisa Murkowski is independent-minded and plainly disgusted by Trumpism; and Susan Collins has an incentive not to piss off the left-leaning majority in her home state with Election Day looming by voting to confirm.

 

So rejecting Blanche is essentially all upside and no downside for John Thune’s conference. They can strike a symbolic blow against the president’s corruption of the Justice Department without meaningfully impeding that corruption in any way, which is right in their wheelhouse of posturing as civic-minded while slavishly serving Trump.

 

Blanche even made it easy for them by behaving like a rodent so comprehensively. Committing one impeachable offense is easily overlooked, as it’s par for the course among Trump appointees, but the would-be attorney general has committed several. As low as my expectations for congressional Republicans have become, I really did expect them to nuke this nomination.

 

But it seems like they’re going to confirm. Until Democrats control the Senate, there will be no legislative resistance to postliberals’ attempts to convert the DOJ into a criminal syndicate’s in-house counsel.

 

Red herrings.

 

Senate Republicans are playing a cynical game to justify supporting Blanche. To avoid grappling with his record in full, they’re zeroing in on individual transgressions for which he’s expressed tepid remorse or accountability and touting them as evidence that he’s an okay joe after all.

 

They’re red herrings, designed to distract from the totality of his sins by narrowing the political aperture.

 

Cornyn, for instance, met with the nominee last month and pronounced their conversation “positive” because he was promised a “further briefing on the tax audit issue involving President Trump and his family.” The “tax audit issue,” in case you’ve forgotten, saw Blanche sign off on a settlement that granted the president and his children total legal absolution from tax offenses they may have committed in the past. That could be worth up to $100 million to Trump in unpaid taxes and penalties.

 

If you find it impressively conscientious that the nominee to be attorney general is willing to explain in detail why he colluded with his boss to fleece the U.S. Treasury, you’re qualified to serve in the Senate.

 

Collins had a different red herring for reporters when she was asked about meeting with Blanche. “We had an extensive discussion on the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which he has assured me with no equivocation at all that he is not for it, will not pursue it, that it will not exist,” she said, referring to the slush fund that Trump and Blanche contrived to remunerate MAGA criminals. She described their meeting as “very good.”

 

It’s true that Blanche backed off the slush fund—after Senate Republicans began raising hell about it—but read the fine print. The proposed mechanism of creating a dedicated pot of money to be disbursed by Trump-appointed flunkies might be dead but the project of rewarding Trump-aligned sociopaths with taxpayer money is not. According to The Atlantic, the DOJ will likely end up making payouts anyway via a sue-and-settle scheme; instead of applying to a fund, the people who punched cops on January 6 will simply be asked to file a lawsuit against the federal government to receive their check.

 

Susan Collins isn’t stupid. She has every reason to know that Blanche will recreate the slush fund by other means, just like she had every reason to know after Trump’s first impeachment that the president would not, in fact, “learn his lesson.” She’s grasping for ways to rationalize voting to confirm and is hoping that swing voters in Maine will accept an empty promise about the slush fund being dead as good enough.

 

Most mystifying of all is Thom Tillis, who should be all geared up to oppose Blanche. Tillis was skeptical of the acting AG’s many assurances that the slush fund was kaput and tried to insert statutory language that would have officially killed it into an immigration bill last month. And he’s drawn a red line around the insurrection with respect to previous nominations: “Anybody who equivocated on the Jan. 6 rioters, I just can’t support,” he told Politico in April.

 

Conniving with Trump to lavish lottery-style payouts on those same rioters to thank them for their role in a coup plot should qualify as “equivocation,” one would think. Especially to a senator who’s been burned before by giving the president’s nominees the benefit of the doubt: Tillis admitted recently that he now regrets having voted to confirm Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon.

 

Yet, to all appearances, he’s leaning toward supporting Blanche.

 

“I haven’t seen anything that, you know, from a January 6 perspective would be a problem,” he said last month of the acting AG, amazingly. He even told CNN that he has “a positive predisposition toward Blanche.” But lest anyone think he’s a sucker or a cheap date, he cautioned that “if there’s even a whiff of a lack of independence” from the nominee “then that could influence my vote.”

 

A whiff? This man has gone nose-blind inside an abattoir.

 

The stench of servility.

 

There is no case for confirming Todd Blanche, even if you lay the slush fund aside. His servility toward the president is so extreme that he’s formalized it in a sort of anti-ethics.

 

Tillis must have missed this comment at Blanche’s first press conference after he was named acting attorney general (the same one at which he said “I love you” to Trump): “We have ⁠thousands of ongoing investigations and prosecutions going on in this country right now. It ​is true that some of them involve men, women, and entities that the president in the ​past has had issues with and believes should be investigated. That is his right and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning to lead this country.”

 

It may be Trump’s “right” to abuse the power of federal law enforcement to persecute his enemies under some demented postliberal understanding of the “unitary executive theory.” But no lawyer has an ethical duty to abet him, and no lawmaker should want a lawyer who believes otherwise in charge of the Justice Department.

 

If you want to be charitable, you might read Blanche as saying that being a known enemy of Trump’s shouldn’t spare someone from a meritorious prosecution because of how it might look. But why be charitable? According to the New York Times, shortly after taking over the DOJ Blanche “made it clear to senior White House officials that he plans to move more quickly than Ms. Bondi against a handful of Trump targets,” including former CIA chief John Brennan and former January 6 witness Cassidy Hutchinson.

 

We’re talking about a guy who indicted James Comey for posting a picture of seashells.

 

He’s not a crusading lawman whose pursuit of justice just so happens to have led him repeatedly to cross paths with people whom the president hates. He’s very obviously ticking through Trump’s list of enemies and looking for excuses to harass them legally, believing—correctly—that the boss would reward him for it by nominating him for attorney general and that gutless Senate Republicans would confirm him regardless.

 

I’ve made the case against Blanche before at length, more than once, so I won’t rehash it again. I don’t need to, actually: Even if we restrict ourselves to only the most recent unethical DOJ conduct under his leadership, it’s perfectly clear that he shouldn’t be trusted with the power of an assistant DA, let alone attorney general. See if you can detect “a whiff of a lack of independence” in any of what follows.

 

In the last two months, his department reportedly opened investigations into E. Jean Carroll, who successfully sued Trump for sexual abuse and defamation, as well as users on platforms like Reddit and Twitter for criticizing ICE. Several people have been criminally charged for handling pieces of sealant floating in the Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool, an obvious attempt to bolster the president’s narrative that vandalism rather than a botched renovation is to blame for the pool’s lingering problems. Meanwhile, multiple reporters from the New York Times were served with subpoenas last week after a “livid” Trump reportedly threw a tantrum over details of his luxe new plane from Qatar being leaked.

 

None of which is to suggest that the Blanche DOJ is incapable of mercy. The department recently withdrew its January 6 seditious conspiracy case against leaders of the Proud Boys over a federal judge’s objections, for instance.

 

Federal charges against left-wing immigration protesters in Chicago had to be dropped after Justice Department lawyers behaved improperly during grand jury proceedings, including trying to influence grand jurors about the case outside the courtroom. Numerous federal judges in other politically charged cases have moved to quash subpoenas issued by Blanche’s DOJ once it became clear that the underlying probes were “fishing expeditions” designed to harass the targets.

 

As of early June, with a major national election approaching, the Justice Department had for some reason “canceled election-integrity training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses, fired most of the lawyers in its Public Integrity Section and failed to replace the director of its Election Crimes Branch,” per NOTUS. Nor had it moved to set up the usual election “command center” to address matters “like voter intimidation and targeted disinformation meant to hinder a fair process.”

 

Instead the DOJ is hard at work trying to find fraud in Georgia’s 2020 presidential election, assigning hundreds of analysts to a probe of Fulton County’s records. One former senior FBI official told the Times that he’d never seen such an immense surge of agency resources around an investigation outside of something like an inauguration or terrorist attack.

 

The cherry on top of this sh-t sundae came two days ago, when a federal judge referred Blanche to the New York state bar for his role in approving the preposterously corrupt “anti-weaponization” slush fund settlement. (She did the same for two of Trump’s personal attorneys, which stands to reason: Blanche was the president’s defense lawyer before joining the administration.) Imagine confirming someone to be attorney general of the United States at a moment when he’s facing disciplinary action at the judiciary’s behest.

 

Soon, it appears, we won’t need to imagine it.

 

Legacies.

 

I appreciate a sense of humor even in people I despise, so I enjoyed Blanche’s opening statement before the Judiciary Committee this morning. “Above all, we are restoring American trust,” he said with Orwellian flair of his tenure at the DOJ. “In recent years, we watched the Justice Department turned against many of you and a former president, and it damaged the public’s faith in justice. We are fixing that.”

 

Todd Blanche, avenging angel of institutional trust. If he’s confirmed, I’ll never tell you that Americans don’t deserve him.

 

We’re left with a mystery to which I have no solution—why Tillis, Cornyn, and other Republicans with little or nothing to lose by opposing him haven’t already laughed his nomination into oblivion. They should be in legacy mode at this point, eager to salvage what’s left of their reputations for posterity.

 

Admittedly, there isn’t much. The Trump nominees they’ve already approved will assure their infamy. But out of vestigial respect for their institution, one might think they’d want to withhold the Senate’s imprimatur from yet another nominee destined to embarrass them in how he carries out his duties, especially with respect to November’s election. Having done so much already to help transform the executive branch into a mafia organization, members of Congress should logically want to mitigate their complicity.

 

Besides: What good is being liberated from the threat of a presidential-backed primary challenge if you’re not willing to use that freedom?

 

Some will speculate that it’s fear of being ostracized by their presumably Republican-leaning social circles that keeps figures like Tillis and Cornyn on the team. I doubt it. Even if we accept that their dear friends will be disappointed in them for not being more fascist, those bridges should have already burned after Trump marked them for political death, no?

 

Realistically, what sort of buddy shrugged off the president declaring Tillis and Cornyn personae non grata but is now prepared to cut ties if they vote against Todd Blanche—who, I remind you, will still be in charge of the DOJ whether he’s confirmed or not?

 

My guess is that it’s the learned helplessness of Trump-era Republican partisanship in tandem with the perverse modern fetish for an ever stronger presidency that’s tilted Thune’s conference toward Blanche. The best I can do to come up with a case for confirming him is what we might call “deference on steroids”: As long as a nominee has the intellectual capacity to do a job and some sort of relevant experience—and Blanche has both—then the White House should be entitled to the Cabinet it desires.

 

But “deference on steroids” is just a fancy way of saying that Congress should simply no longer practice its constitutional duty of “advice and consent” apart from checking a nominee’s CV and, perhaps, administering a basic IQ test. It would make the candidate’s moral fitness for office entirely the president’s responsibility, not the legislature’s. Which, in Trump’s case, is like letting an arsonist appoint the fire chief.

 

Every time our Republican Congress fails to practice elementary civic hygiene, the case that only Democrats can be trusted to govern America semi-responsibly strengthens. The most one can say for Tillis, Cornyn, and the rest as they consider advancing Blanche is that that case is already so overwhelming that there’s no point in trying to rebut it now.