Attorney General Todd Blanche exposed his “criminal intent” to help President Donald Trump “steal the midterms” when he lashed out at a CNN host, a longtime legal journalist argued.
Marcy Wheeler, an independent journalist who has covered the Jan. 6 prosecutions, made the argument Monday in a post on her Emptywheel blog about Blanche’s Sunday interviews on CNN’s “State of the Union” and CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
Blanche used both interviews to defend a Justice Department lawsuit claiming a second candidate, Dan Sullivan, could confuse voters in Alaska’s tight U.S. Senate race, where Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) is seeking reelection, The Washington Post reported.
“[O]ne of the big questions is whether or not the president is laying the groundwork for a scenario where … President Trump tries to overturn the election, and the result of that could be, God forbid, what we saw after January 6,” CNN host Dana Bash told Blanche.
“Oh, you got to stop it with that. You are not being a real person. Come on, man,” Blanche shot back.
“Why are you yelling at me?” Bash asked.
“We’re not laying any groundwork for the president to do that,” Blanche said after several more exchanges.
Yet the lawsuit asks a federal judge to keep Alaska from certifying any result “that may be impacted by voter confusion,” according to the complaint.
“[A]ll the dodging first makes his deceit clear,” Wheeler wrote of what she called Blanche’s “meltdown” with Bash. She added that he “attacked her, pretending that Trump hasn’t tried this ploy precisely before.”
Wheeler compared Blanche to Jeffrey Clark, a senior Justice Department official who in 2020 pushed to send states a letter falsely claiming irregularities may have changed the election’s outcome. She noted that federal agents later searched Clark’s home.
“[T]hat’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” Clark replied after a deputy White House counsel warned that if Trump stayed in office despite losing, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States,” according to Trump’s 2023 indictment. The law lets a president deploy troops on U.S. soil.
“I will never, ever, ever talk about communications that I have with the president of the United States,” Blanche told CBS host Margaret Brennan on Sunday when she asked whether Trump told him to file the Alaska suit.
He credited the lawsuit instead to “the Department of Justice doing our own research.”
But asked about the suit two days earlier, Trump told reporters, “Well, I’m one that said, ‘Do it.’”
In June, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled that Trump had no constitutional authority to regulate state elections the way his March executive order attempted, Votebeat reported.
The outlet described it as one defeat in a series of court losses for Trump’s attempts to take control of elections, which the Constitution leaves to the states and Congress.
“I work for President Trump,” Blanche said Oct. 21 on the New York Post’s “Pod Force One” podcast, calling the idea of the Justice Department’s independence from the White House a “misperception,” The New Republic reported.
The outlet noted that the Justice Department set up policies after Watergate to distance itself from the White House.
“Blanche knows that SCOTUS won’t let prosecutors access communications between him and Trump … so he is trying to give this crime a virgin birth in ‘research,’” Wheeler wrote. She pointed to the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling that Trump was “absolutely immune” from prosecution over his discussions with Justice Department officials.
“Todd Blanche may well avoid Jeffrey Clark’s fate, thanks in no small part to the corruption of the Supreme Court,” Wheeler concluded. “But he couldn’t hide his criminal intent.”
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