“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” President Trump famously asked in his first term, angrily despairing at not having an attorney general who’d serve his interests, no holds barred, just as Trump’s reptilian mentor and fixer Cohn had done for clients from the notorious red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy to New York mob bosses and a young Trump.
For his second term Trump finally found his Cohn: acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, his former personal lawyer and, it’s painfully obvious, still his personal lawyer, only now at the Department of “Justice” and at taxpayers’ expense. Trump just needs to get the Republican-run Senate to confirm Blanche as the actual AG, the nation’s top law enforcement official.
Given Republican senators’ sorry record of caving to Trump’s uniformly unfit Cabinet nominees, Blanche’s confirmation unfortunately is a good bet. But it’s not a sure one.
Two factors offer some hope that the Senate could bust Blanche, in Senate-speak. Ideally, by doing so, a Senate majority of Democrats and newly backboned Republicans then could hold out to force Trump to nominate someone outside the awful mold of his second-term picks — former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (felled by teen-sex and prostitution allegations, among others), the recently fired Pam Bondi and now Blanche.
Hope springs eternal when the rule of law is at stake.
One factor is simply Blanche’s damning record over 17 months at the Justice Department, first as its No. 2 official, deputy to then-Atty. Gen. Bondi, and as the acting attorney general since April 2. Blanche is a known commodity, and not in a good way. We know what he would do as AG because he’s doing it.
According to an ethics complaint on Monday from 101 former state and federal judges, Democrats and Republicans, and two pro-democracy groups seeking an investigation by the New York State Bar, Blanche “has engaged in conduct that violates his core responsibilities of competence, diligence, loyalty, and honesty.”
In less than three months as acting AG, he’s overseen the legally suspect “settlement” of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, a deal that both created a $1.8 billion slush fund to reward Jan. 6 insurrectionists and other Trump loyalists purportedly targeted by the Biden administration and gave Trump, his family and companies a tax amnesty erasing an estimated $100 million in potential liabilities to the Treasury. Last month, the federal judge in the IRS case reopened it, to pursue “grievous allegations” from 35 former federal judges, including Republican appointees, that the Blanche-blessed settlement was “premised on deception.”
As Bondi herself recently testified to Congress, Blanche has been responsible for the (mis)handling of the Epstein files, violating a bipartisan federal law by withholding millions of documents, including those relating to Trump, and illegally disclosing victims’ identities.
From the time of Trump’s return to power, Blanche has led the continued weaponization of the Justice Department against his client’s Democratic enemies, including investigations of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Sen. Adam Schiff. And not just Democrats are being prosecuted. Blanche recently approved a criminal inquiry into Cassidy Hutchinson, the young former Trump White House aide who was a heroic witness against him in the House Jan. 6 investigation, and Blanche secured a second indictment of former FBI Director James Comey after a judge dismissed the first specious one.
Meanwhile, under Blanche’s “leadership,” DOJ has moved to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes and Proud Boys leaders who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6.
As bad as all that is, perhaps worse is that Blanche has led the DOJ as its prosecutors have compiled an unprecedented record of actual and suspected misconduct in federal courts. In just the latest report of such malfeasance, CNN on Monday identified 77 rulings in which judges appointed by presidents of both parties, including Trump, have accused government lawyers of disregarding the laws and the Constitution, retaliating against opponents and/or defying court orders.
So great were the government’s alleged abuses in its Chicago prosecution of the “Broadview Six,” involving protests against the feds’ violent anti-immigration crackdown in the city last year, that the Trump administration not only dropped all criminal charges but, last week, also agreed to pay protesters’ legal fees. The federal judge in that case, after reviewing grand jury transcripts, said she’d never seen such “prosecutorial behavior” and raised the possibility of sanctions for “lack of candor to the court.”
Yet the man who spearheaded the prosecution stands ready to become attorney general, and just initiated a new round of criminal indictments against protesters of the administration’s deadly immigration tactics in Minnesota. Meanwhile, there’s been no accountability for the federal agents who killed protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
And that brings us finally to the second factor potentially threatening Blanche’s Senate confirmation: Trump has created a small caucus of Republicans who feel they no longer owe him anything, either because he helped end their Senate careers for being insufficiently loyal or because he’s become so unpopular in their states.
Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, as members of the closely divided Senate Judiciary Committee, each could nuke Blanche’s nomination by opposing him there, assuming all Democrats on the panel oppose Blanche, as is likely. Tillis’ credibility especially is on the line: He’s said he’ll oppose any nominee supportive of the Jan. 6 rioters.
Well, Blanche boasted at a conservative conference in March that anyone who “had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump” for the Jan. 6 assault and for taking classified documents is gone from the DOJ and the FBI, and that “every one” of the Jan. 6 defendants “was either pardoned or had his sentence commuted.”
As Cornyn said recently, speaking for the supposedly liberated senators, “We’ve got some cards to play.”
Well, then, play ’em against Blanche, and trump Trump. Americans concerned for the rule of law are calling your bluff.
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