The Senate narrowly voted to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general early Saturday morning, cementing President Donald Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer as the head of the Justice Department despite rare pushback from Republicans that had left his nomination in doubt.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) provided the crucial vote for Blanche as two other Republicans — Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine — sided with Democrats against the nominee. Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), who has been absent from the Senate since he suffered a fall in June, missed the vote.
The 50-49 vote at 4:31 a.m. — right before the Senate left for a five-week recess — gives Blanche the imprimatur of Senate confirmation in a job he has held on an acting basis since Trump fired former attorney general Pam Bondi in April.
But it hardly amounted to a full-throated endorsement.
Cassidy, despite voting in Blanche’s favor, joined Murkowski and Collins in publicly raising questions about the politicization of the Justice Department under Trump. The three also voiced concerns about Blanche’s role in a controversial deal struck this spring to resolve the president’s legal claims against the IRS — a deal that included a now-scuttled proposal for a $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claimed they were victims of political prosecutions.
Two other Republican senators — John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — expressed similar reservations and threatened earlier in the process to vote against the nomination, although both ultimately backed Blanche on Friday.
Explaining his decision, Cassidy on Friday described it as a choice between Blanche — who before his time as Trump’s personal lawyer had spent years as a federal prosecutor and a partner at a prestigious Manhattan law firm — and the possibility that Trump might pick someone worse.
“Mr. Blanche is not perfect, and he will tell you this, but the choice is not between perfection and Mr. Blanche,” Cassidy said on the Senate floor. “It is between Mr. Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the department as effectively under President Trump and who, indeed, may not be as good as Mr. Blanche.”
With the confirmation fight now behind him, Blanche sheds the “acting” part of his title and, with it, any doubt about his authority as the head of a cabinet agency that Trump has made central to his second-term agenda.
Since returning to the White House last year, the president has eroded the Justice Department’s long tradition of independence, demanding it pursue prosecutions of his political enemies and directing resources toward rewarding his allies.
Meanwhile, the department has been ravaged by vacancies, low morale among career staff, and increasing credibility problems with federal judges.
Blanche, first as Bondi’s No. 2 and then as the department’s acting leader, has played a central role in that transformation, although his boosters in Congress have praised his efforts to step up fraud enforcement, prosecute illegal immigration and combat violent crime.
Cassidy called aspects of Blanche’s track record troubling, but he cited the bond Blanche built with Trump as he defended him in four criminal cases during his years out of office. The senator said he hoped that trust would strengthen Blanche’s ability to talk the president out of decisions that run contrary to the rule of law.
But Democrats insist that, at every turn, Blanche has proven unable — or unwilling — to do just that.
Since becoming acting attorney general, Blanche has defended the president’s “right” to intervene in criminal investigations and his controversial pardons of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He has breathed new life into probes of Trump critics, including investigations of former FBI Director James B. Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan and Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide from the president’s first term who testified against him in Congress.
But it is the out-of-court deal Blanche announced this spring to resolve a lawsuit the president filed against the IRS earlier this year, over the leak of his tax returns to the media, that has drawn the most unified criticism from lawmakers.
In addition to the taxpayer-backed nearly $1.8 billion payout fund, the deal also extended unusual tax protections to Trump, two of his sons and their businesses, shielding them from any preexisting tax audits.
Lawmakers from both parties decried the agreement, describing the proposed payouts as a “slush fund” designed to reward Trump’s allies, and denouncing the tax provisions as a corrupt exercise in self-dealing from a president who has often complained of burdensome audits.
Facing bipartisan pressure, Blanche walked back plans for the fund. But Cornyn and Tillis, both of whom are not running for reelection after Trump declined to support them, demanded written assurances from Blanche that the president would not later reverse that decision before they agreed to support his nomination.
Blanche ultimately relented, issuing statements late last Sunday declaring the fund officially dead and clarifying that the deal’s tax provisions protected the Trumps only from past tax audits and would not prevent the IRS from reviewing their finances in the future.
But critics have questioned whether Blanche’s written pledges hold any legal weight, given that they were not signed by Trump and his legal team, and could be ignored by the president at any point.
Murkowski raised that possibility in a statement Friday announcing her decision to vote against Blanche’s nomination. The only reason the payout fund was now off the table, she said, was because Blanche needed Senate support for his nomination.
“Once we vote, that will end, and there is no telling what the future holds,” she said.
“The country needs an attorney general who will check the worst impulses of this administration,” Murkowski added. “I hope Mr. Blanche is able to achieve that if confirmed, but I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.”
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