Attorney General Todd Blanche has been busy.
In the run up to the Nov. 3 midterm elections, the nation’s most powerful law enforcement official has hit the campaign trail, stumping at the Republican convention in Texas and at rallies for candidates aligned with President Donald Trump in New York and North Carolina.
The Justice Department, under Blanche’s leadership, has filed broad and controversial election-related lawsuits, including suing the state of Alaska last week to preemptively block certification of the results of the state’s tight Senate race if the Republican candidate loses.
The Justice Department has also executed search warrants and filed criminal charges against some of Trump’s political foes, delivering on promises to the president’s conservative base that current and former officials viewed as corrupt or undermining the president would face legal consequences.
The Justice Department has traditionally stayed quiet in the months before an election, fearful of being perceived of using its law enforcement weight to influence elections. But Blanche has had some of his busiest weeks as attorney general ahead of next week’s midterms, cannonballing into politically fraught cases as the president cheers him on.
The agency’s recent targets include James B. Comey, a former director of the FBI and staunch Trump critic who this month was hit with a third federal case in 13 months.
The Justice Department also this week tried and failed to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump aide, for allegedly lying to Congress during her testimony about the president’s actions during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Days earlier, the agency charged two former FBI officials, who have long been targets of right-wing attacks, with lying to Congress.
Trump’s most ardent supporters have applauded Blanche, saying the Justice Department has long been weaponized against the president and that he is bringing legitimate cases against people who they believe broke the law.
“This Department is following the facts and the law, not anybody’s political time table,” the department said in a statement.
But critics and former Justice Department attorneys say the attorney general is allowing the agency to bring weak cases aimed at seemingly delivering on the president’s desire for vengeance, rather than for legitimate law enforcement reasons, before voters head to the polls.
“What we’re seeing at the Justice Department is deeply troubling, not because of any one case, but because of the cumulative pattern,” said Perry Carbone, a longtime federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York who left the department last year. “A Justice Department cannot maintain public trust if its decisions appear to depend on whom the president likes, whom he dislikes, or whom he wants to punish.”
With the midterms looming, the Justice Department has taken a series of aggressive steps against Trump’s political foes and on issues that he and his allies have focused on for years.
Two weeks ago, federal authorities searched the D.C. home of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar (Minnesota) over allegations that the first Somali-American congresswoman lied on immigration paperwork.
Attorneys for Omar, who is up for reelection in November, characterized the search as politically motivated, saying the congresswoman is a critic of Trump who Republicans have spurred baseless accusations against her for years.
Blanche and the Justice Department defended the search and its timing.
They said the agency’s 60-day policy — the unwritten guideline stating that the Justice Department should refrain from taking public law enforcement actions in the two months before an election — is an informal practice and not a written rule. And they have said this policy does not require law enforcement to stop ongoing work during the election season.
“We don’t do political paybacks,” Blanche said at a news conference last week.
The week after searching Omar’s home, the Justice Department indicted Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, one of the most powerful Democrats in the commonwealth, as part of a long-running corruption investigation involving a family-run marijuana business. Her attorney said Lucas denied the charges.
Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel appeared together in a rare news conference announcing the charges against the state senator. Lucas, an outspoken Trump critic, and Democrats said the case was politically motivated. Blanche defended the indictment.
“What we’re doing is very consistent with past practices,” Blanche said at the news conference announcing the charges. “People can criticize all they want.”
The investigation into Lucas was launched during the Biden administration. Lucas’s daughter, Lisa Lucas-Burke, was also charged and is on the ballot in November for a Portsmouth City Council seat.
The next day, the Justice Department charged two former FBI officials with making false statements to Congress that allegedly hindered a Republican-led House committee as it was investigating President Joe Biden’s son Hunter in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. Through their attorneys, both ex-officials denied wrongdoing.
Those FBI officials had been the subject of right-wing online excoriations for years, with conservatives claiming that they purposely tried to stymie Republican lawmakers investigations into the laptop.
The flurry of legal activity continued that evening, with the Justice Department filing an extraordinary lawsuit in Alaska that asked a judge to bar the state from certifying its Senate race results should the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan, lose by a margin less than the number of votes received by a similarly named challenger, Dan J. Sullivan.
Under that scenario, the department said, the court should investigate whether the result was tainted by voter confusion.
Alaska’s Republican-led state government seeks to have the lawsuit thrown out.
In a remarkable admission highlighting the closeness between Blanche and Trump, the president said he directed the Justice Department to sue Alaska.
“I’m the one that said do it,” Trump said ahead of a campaign rally in Florida. Blanche has since said the Justice Department has been eyeing the issue for months and came to its own conclusion to file suit.
On Monday, the Justice Department’s actions hit a crescendo when court documents were unsealed revealing that prosecutors had charged Comey for a third time earlier this month.
This time, the Justice Department alleged that he leaked sensitive government material to the media in 2016 while FBI director. Trump fired Comey in 2017 during his first administration.
In an extremely rare move, prosecutors did not obtain an indictment through a grand jury to charge Comey, but rather charged him in D.C. with a criminal information.
The Justice Department said that it filed it through a criminal information to avoid having the 10-year statute of limitations for the crime take effect. That statute of limitations was set to expire the day prosecutors charged Comey.
But critics said that questionable maneuver highlighted the Justice Department’s furious attempts to quickly push through what they viewed as a weak case without going through a grand jury, which could have voted not to indict the case. The Justice Department will eventually need to secure an indictment through a grand jury.
A Justice Department spokesperson noted that federal officials filed the information under seal on Oct. 5 and that a judge decided to make it public earlier this week at the request of Comey’s lawyers.
Former Justice Department attorneys questioned the merits of the case. Prosecutors allege that Comey directed his staff in 2016 to talk to a reporter to address what he viewed as misinformation in an article about email surveillance published by another news outlet the previous day.
“My reaction to the information is that it’s dead on arrival,” said Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general who is representing defendants being investigated by the Trump administration. “It is remarkable to me that they have brought three terrible cases against the same man.”
Comey has denied the latest allegations and vowed to fight the case against him.
The post Comey, Hutchinson and more Trump foes are in Justice Dept.’s pre-election sights appeared first on Washington Post.
