Interim Attorney General Todd Blanche insisted that he had no idea why President Donald Trump had fired former Attorney General Pam Bondi.
During a Tuesday press conference, Blanche was asked to square his pledge to root out weaponization at the Department of Justice with Trump’s demand that his enemies be prosecuted.
“You had [people in] this department who stood idly by why states tried to keep President Trump off the ballot,” Blanche complained. “When I see reporting about shock and awe at this supposed weaponization of this department, of this Department of Justice, it means nothing to me because it’s completely false.”
“So, so I, I understand the question and I understand the, the pretty constant role of the media that somehow this department is weaponizing itself, but it happens not to be true,” he continued. “We have tens of thousands of prosecutors all over this country putting bad guys in jail, OK?”
“Did she lose her job, though, because she was not successful in that pursuit?” one reporter said of Bondi.
“You read the same exact communication from the president that I did,” Blanche quipped. “Pam Bondi is a trusted friend of President Trump’s; will remain so. And no, nobody has any idea why the attorney general is no longer the attorney general, and I’m the acting attorney general except for President Trump.”
Later at the event, a reporter pressed Blanche on why nobody knew the reason for Bondi’s dismissal.
“Can you just expand on your comment that nobody has any idea why Ms. Bondi is no longer the Attorney General?” the reporter said. “It seems like it’s kind of a problem if you don’t know what it is the President wants you guys to be doing better.”
“Now, that’s an assumption that’s baked into your question that I don’t know that it’s true,” Blanche snapped. “I don’t operate every day trying to second-guess what President Trump or anybody else is thinking. I just operate every day on doing everything that I need to do to execute the president’s agenda and priorities.”
“So what I was commenting on, and to expand on my comment, is that I grow tired of people in the media saying why President Trump did or did do something, because President Trump’s the only one that knows that. And so that was, I meant nothing more and nothing less than that, that President Trump’s decision for making the decision he did are his own and nobody else’s.”
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