Block Blanche

He must not become AG.

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There is a particular species of Washington careerist who convinces himself that the oath he swore was a formality, a bit of throat-clearing before the real work of pleasing the boss begins.

Todd Blanche is an apex predator of that species. He is the man who looked at the Department of Justice, an institution built to stand between raw political power and the citizen, and saw not a sacred trust but a tool to please Donald Trump.

A very large, very expensive tool, with 115,000 employees with guns and badges and legal power that he could hand to Donald Trump like a caddy handing over a nine iron.

Trump has now nominated this man to be Attorney General of the United States, permanently, with the title and the office and the flag behind the desk. So let us be clear about what confirmation would ratify.

Let us catalog the sins.

Start with the original sin, because everything else flows from it. Todd Blanche does not know the difference between his client and his country. When he walks into Main Justice every morning, the man he serves is not the American people. It is the man who signs his continued employment.

Adam Schiff put it with the precision of a former prosecutor: at every turn, Blanche has been unable to put aside his role as Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer and represent the American people instead.

This is not a metaphor. Blanche literally was Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, in three of the criminal cases brought against him in 2023 and 2024. He sat at the defense table. He argued for absolute presidential immunity before the Supreme Court, co-authoring the brief that helped birth the monstrous doctrine that a president is a king within the four corners of his office. And then, having done that work, he was installed atop the very department that had prosecuted his client, where he could finish the job from the inside.

The Attorney General’s client is supposed to be an abstraction so large it can be hard to hold in your head: two-thirds of a billion people, but the Constitution and the idea that the law applies without fear or favor.

Blanche traded that abstraction for a man. He knows exactly who he works for. He has never pretended otherwise. That is the whole problem, and it is disqualifying before we get to anything else.

People confirm men like Blanche imagining the damage as prospective, a risk to be managed. It is not prospective. He has been running the building since April 2, when Trump defenestrated Pam Bondi for the crime of trying, and failing, to gin up prosecutions unsupported by facts and law. Blanche’s qualification for the promotion was that he would not make the same mistake.

Under his leadership, more than 16,000 people have walked out of the Department of Justice, including roughly a quarter of its attorneys. Think about that number. Not a purge of the top layer, a hemorrhage of the institution itself, the career prosecutors and agents and staff who are the actual muscle and memory of federal law enforcement.

He fired the people who worked January 6 cases. He fired people who worked the Jack Smith investigations. He moved to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers leadership, the men who organized the assault on the Capitol, as though the whole thing had been a misunderstanding.

And then he pointed the emptied-out machine at new targets. The Southern Poverty Law Center got indicted on a theory so thin that federal law enforcement had reportedly known about and been aided by the very informant program Blanche stood at a podium to condemn. A whistleblower alleges one of his enforcers ordered Alabama prosecutors to rush the SPLC indictment through despite doubts about whether the case was any good. This is what a weaponized DOJ looks like from the inside: the case comes first, and the facts get conscripted to serve it.

Nothing captures the man better than the persecution of James Comey. The former FBI director posted a photograph of seashells arranged to spell “86 47” and deleted it. For this, Blanche’s Justice Department indicted him. Twice, actually, because the first grand jury effort was such a legal embarrassment they had to go back for another bite.

Understand what the government is alleging: that a retired official committed a felony threat against the president by arranging shells on a beach. Adam Schiff, who spent six years as a federal prosecutor, said he had never seen a case this weak, and offered that in the future, when some DOJ lawyer proposes bringing something this flimsy, there should be a new name for it. He also named the actual motive without flinching.

The case exists, Schiff said, because Comey is a political opponent, because the president called for his prosecution, and because Todd Blanche wants to keep this job.

There it is. The Attorney General of the United States, or the man who wants to be, running a federal prosecution not because a crime occurred but because bringing it is his audition tape. Bondi got fired for not being able to deliver the president’s enemies. Blanche learned the lesson. Comey is the receipt.

The same apparatus has been grinding away at Letitia James, at Schiff himself, at Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, whom Trump has publicly demanded be prosecuted. The through line is not evidence. The through line is a list of people who made Donald Trump angry.

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Reread the Comey section. Retired federal official. Instagram post. Photograph of seashells arranged on a beach to spell “86 47.” Felony indictment. Not one grand jury but two, because the first attempt was such a legal embarrassment they had to go back for a second scoop.

That is what Todd Blanche’s Department of Justice now considers a case. A phone. A photo. A search engine. And suddenly you are the defendant.

Now ask yourself what a hostile federal prosecutor could build from the file currently sitting on you, right now, on data broker sites you have never heard of and never visited.

Someone just looked you up. You had no idea.

A researcher at Consumer Reports — someone whose job is online safety — typed her own name into a search engine. Her home address, age, and phone number were sitting there, on data broker sites she’d never heard of. No hack. No breach. Just her name in a search box.

Yours is there too. Right now. Available to an ex, a stranger, anyone who decides they want to find you.

Or a DOJ paralegal working up a Blanche audition tape in Main Justice. Or the private-sector opposition researchers his crew has quietly hired to build the “grand conspiracy” indictments. Or the ICE contractor cross-referencing home addresses against the SPLC’s donor rolls. Or the Payback Squad down the hall at the Bureau.

If you have donated to a Democrat, published a critical column, worked in the Biden administration, sat on a school board that a MAGA operative decided to make an example of, prosecuted a January 6 defendant, or if your name appears anywhere on the list Rick just described — the list of people who made Donald Trump angry — your file is currently on sale for pocket change to anyone with a grievance and a grand jury subpoena in his back pocket.

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Take yourself off the market before you end up in the file the next Blanche opens on a Tuesday morning.

Now, back to the confirmation.

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Now the money, because there is always money in this corrupt griftorama era.

Trump had a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Blanche settled it, and the settlement’s centerpiece was a fund, an “anti-weaponization fund,” to compensate people who claimed the federal government had done them wrong. The total was set at $1.776 billion. They chose that number as a nod to the Declaration of Independence, which tells you everything about the self-mythologizing grandiosity of these goons. They wanted to loot the Treasury and dress it up as a Fourth of July parade.

Who would the fund pay? Blanche was asked, directly, whether Proud Boys and Oath Keepers convicted of beating Capitol Police officers could collect. He would not rule it out. Anybody in this country can apply, he said, and the commission will set the rules, as though he were describing a raffle and not a mechanism to funnel taxpayer money to men who assaulted cops on live television.

Pardoned January 6 defendants lined up to file claims. So did Michael Cohen. Even Trump’s own allies gagged; a Republican congresswoman called it a billion-dollar-plus slush fund to his face.

The backlash got loud enough that Blanche went before a House committee and said the fund was not going forward, period. But watch the hands. Judge Leonie Brinkema asked him to put that in writing, under penalty of perjury, a sworn declaration that the thing was dead in any manner, under any name. He refused. The Justice Department called her request unnecessary and declined to file it. A man who genuinely meant it would sign the paper.

Blanche of course wants the option to bring it back, and the tax provision buried in the settlement, the one that quietly cleared away audits of Trump and his family and his businesses, that part he defended and that part stayed. The slush fund was the misdirection. The immunity was the trick. Fortunately, a Florida judge nuked the immunity case this week, but I suspect Blanche will fight like hell to bring it back.

Gotta protect the client, right, Todd?

And then there is Ghislaine Maxwell, which is where the contempt for the public curdles into something genuinely dark. When the Epstein files became a political inferno that scorched Trump’s own base, Blanche personally proposed, at a White House crisis meeting, that he interview Maxwell himself. The convicted child sex trafficker. Nine hours across two days.

He was not there as a prosecutor. He offered her immunity for the conversation and made no promises about her sentence, which is a strange way to interrogate a witness and a very natural way to conduct a job interview for a pardon. Weeks later, Maxwell was transferred to a lower-security facility, reportedly in violation of standing Bureau of Prisons policy. The Deputy Attorney General of the United States flew to Florida, sat across from a woman convicted of trafficking children, and gave her a 300-page platform to rewrite history and distance Trump from his old friend, never once challenging her court-proven lies.

Epstein’s victims and their families are outraged over this nomination, and rightly so. Even Pam Bondi, in her own testimony, put the Maxwell decision on Blanche.

Blanche is running the largest cover-up in American history, protecting sexual predators and harming their victims…and that alone utterly disqualifies him from becoming A.G.

This is the tell. When the choice was between the survivors of the worst crimes imaginable and the political protection of Donald Trump, Blanche chose Trump, and he chose him by cutting a deal with the woman who helped commit those crimes. There is no version of the Attorney General’s oath that permits that. There is only the client.

I’ll repeat it again for the MAGAs in the back: the Attorney General does not work for the president in the way a White House lawyer works for the president. That distance is the entire point. It was built in blood and scandal, hardened after Watergate, when the country learned what happens when the Justice Department becomes the president’s personal enforcer.

The AG is supposed to be able to look at the man who appointed him and say no. To decline the weak case. To refuse the vendetta. To refuse to sign on to lies and oversights, no matter how much complying would help the President. That’s not Blanche,

Blanche has inverted every one of those principles. He brings the weak case. He runs the vendetta. He signs on to every lie. He empties the building of everyone with the integrity to object and fills the silence with loyalists. He has taken the one office in American government whose independence is vital for the rule of law, and he has offered it, on his knees, to a man who wants to use it as a weapon.

The Senate is being asked to make this permanent. To take the temporary occupant who has done all of this in a matter of months and hand him the title, the tenure, and the flag. Every senator who votes yes is not voting for a man.

They are voting to erase the line between the president’s lawyer and the people’s lawyer, forever, and to reward the man who took the eraser to it with the greatest prize in American law.

Todd Blanche knows exactly who he serves.

It’s not the American people.

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