Todd Blanche is Roy Cohn ... but worse
Republicans own the orgy of corruption that will follow their vote to confirm him.
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“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump wailed in 2017, after Jeff Sessions heeded his ethical obligation to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
The president demanded an attorney general in the mold of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s famously ruthless sidekick, one who would subordinate every professional, moral, and legal obligation to his boss’s needs. All his predecessors had enjoyed this privilege, Trump insisted, conveniently ignoring the fact that Attorney General Janet Reno let independent counsel Ken Starr run roughshod over Bill Clinton, and Trump would likely have lost in 2016 if FBI Director James Comey had been on any kind of presidential leash.
Nine years later, Trump has finally found his Roy Cohn, but with a prodigious aptitude for sycophancy substituted for the personal demons.
“I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche simpered in April after his predecessor Pam Bondi got pushed out. “And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, ‘Thank you very much, I love you, sir.’”
Roy Cohn never got to run a federal law enforcement agency, but the degradation of the Justice Department that began during Bondi’s tenure has only accelerated under Blanche’s leadership. The organization has shrunk in both numbers and esteem, as competent prosecutors are pushed out and judges decry the flagrant abuse of the judicial process perpetrated by the government.
This week, the Senate will get a chance to weigh in on Blanche’s performance, with hearings today and Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Barring something very unexpected, they will vote to confirm Blanche as permanent attorney general, blessing the chaos that will follow.
Republicans order the shit sandwich
As they typically do when the president serves up a shit sandwich of corruption seasoned with a healthy schmear of self-dealing, a handful of Republican senators are pretending that they might not give Trump what he wants.
Sen. Thom Tillis, who is retiring next year, has the power to sink Blanche by deadlocking the vote to advance him out of the Judiciary Committee.
Last month, Tillis made some mouth noises about requiring Blanche to hold firm on January 6 rioters. In fact, the DOJ has been working assiduously to do the opposite. Just last week, they forced a federal judge to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of several Proud Boys gang members.
Tillis still hasn’t said how he’ll vote, but after meeting one-on-one with Blanche in June, he announced he had “a positive predisposition” toward the nominee. His only reservation is about the “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund that Trump and Blanche cooked up to “settle” a lawsuit against the IRS.
Blanche claims the slush fund, which earmarked $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for Trump’s supporters, is DOA, although he refuses to put it in writing. But an immunity deal to protect Trump and his family from prosecution for tax crimes, worth perhaps $100 million to Trump personally, remains in force.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who lost his primary after Trump endorsed his opponent Ken Paxton, is grumbling about the Get Out of Tax Jail Free card. And Sen. Josh Hawley howls performatively about the need for the DOJ to prosecute anyone who uses the mail to send abortion medications every time someone puts a microphone near him.
But ultimately this is all for show. Republicans might let Sen. Susan Collins withhold her blessing, but they wouldn’t be holding the hearing if they didn’t have the votes.
Republicans are going to confirm Todd Blanche as attorney general, and they own everything that comes after that.
Witch hunts … but for real
If past is prologue, what comes after will be a steady stream of political prosecutions.
Blanche’s tenure started with an indictment of Comey, Trump’s longtime nemesis, for posting a photo of seashells arranged to spell "86 47." Other political enemies include California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who said in June that the DOJ had subpoenaed his family's financial records, and Virginia state Sen. Louise Lucas, the 82-year-old president pro tempore of the Virginia Senate, whose office and business were raided just two weeks after she spearheaded a redistricting referendum.
The DOJ’s subpoena of former Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell was blocked by the courts, and the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James seems to have run aground. But Blanche knows that the only way to hang onto this job is to produce a steady stream of arrests of his boss’s enemies.
He’s currently parked a squad of lawyers in Florida and convened a grand jury in the Fort Pierce courthouse supervised by Judge Aileen Cannon. They’re investigating everything from the FBI’s inquiries into Russian election interference in 2016 to Trump’s election interference and stolen documents prosecutions.
Under the aegis of right-wing commentator Joe diGenova, who hasn’t prosecuted a case since the mid-’90s, they’ve fired off subpoenas to Comey, former DNI James Clapper, and former CIA director John Brennan. The theory undergirding this operation is that all of these disparate events are part of one, vast, ongoing conspiracy to get Trump, and thus the statute of limitations, which would normally bar prosecutions of 10-year-old “crimes,” does not apply.
Meanwhile Blanche’s deputies crack the whip on local US Attorneys Offices, demanding indictments of protesters, dissidents, and other enemies of the regime.
In Tennessee, that led to the indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who dared to embarrass the Trump administration by fighting his rendition to CECOT. It also led to the dismissal of all charges when the judge found that the case was brought for vindictive purposes under pressure from Blanche’s henchmen.
In DC, US Attorney Jeanine Pirro suffered a string of embarrassing failures, as juries refused to indict or convict defendants she claims are hardened criminals. She’s now managed to indict David Hearn, a former Olympian, for vandalizing the Reflecting Pool — a case which is virtually guaranteed to fall apart faster than a plastic pool liner doused with hydrogen peroxide.
The US Attorney’s Office in Chicago has been the scene of the most embarrassing public disintegration, culminating in the dismissal of all charges against the “Broadview Six” amid revelations of gross prosecutorial misconduct.
US Attorney Andrew Boutros was forced to admit that he’d known for months about the tainted grand jury presentations, and has since had to drop at least three more cases tied to the same prosecutor. And yet, Boutros managed to step in it again last week, appearing at a press conference with Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel at which he disclosed details of a sealed criminal complaint.
For at least the third time in a month, Boutros was summoned to the courtroom and ordered to explain his “clear violation” of a judicial order.
Slush fund melts
Blanche’s most scandalous act of corruption was the “settlement” he cooked up to create the “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund.
In January, Donald Trump and his sons sued the IRS over the wrongful disclosure of their tax returns by a federal contractor in 2020. Instead of moving to dismiss the case for being outside the statute of limitations, the DOJ studiously avoided entering an appearance.
Trump’s lawyers secured multiple delays and eventually informed the court that the case had been “settled.” The Justice Department announced that it was creating a settlement fund to disburse almost $1.8 billion to compensate people harmed by the Biden administration. The Proud Boys and their allies rejoiced, anticipating seven- or eight-figure payouts. The next day, Blanche alone signed an “addendum” purporting to immunize Trump, his family, and his businesses from future IRS audits.
This prospect of the government handing tax dollars over to people who beat cops was too much for Senate Republicans, and eventually Blanche agreed to drop the plan — although he wasn’t willing to put that in writing, or to let go of the deal to protect Trump from future audits.
But Judge Kathleen Williams, who presided over the IRS case, wasn’t finished either. Last week, she produced a scathing order calling the DOJ out for colluding with Trump’s personal lawyers to gin up a fake lawsuit and then a fake settlement. Courts can only adjudicate actual controversies, and there’s no live dispute when the president is both the plaintiff and the defendant — a point Trump has effectively conceded by insisting in court and on social media that he has the right to control every inch of the executive branch.
Judge Williams barred the parties from citing the “settlement” as evidence that Trump is immune from future prosecution for tax crimes. She excoriated Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward for violating their ethical duty to recuse themselves from cases involving their former clients — by which she meant Trump, of course, as well as multiple January 6 defendants who were represented by Woodward. She referred Trump’s current personal lawyer, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar, and directed that a copy of her ruling be sent to the New York and DC Bars, where there are pending ethics complaints against Blanche and Woodward.
Presumption of irregularity
Blanche and Woodward are the highest-ranking DOJ lawyers to be referred for professional discipline — but they’re not the only ones! Blanche’s tenure has seen multiple lawyers in his employ held in contempt and cited for professional misconduct.
This is an astonishing erosion of credibility for an agency which formerly enjoyed total respect from the courts.
In February, a federal judge in Oregon tossed the DOJ’s demand to seize the state’s voter rolls, writing that “the presumption of regularity that has been previously extended to Plaintiff that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.” In March, a judge in New Jersey railed that “generations of Assistant US Attorneys had built the goodwill of that office for your generation to destroy it within a year.”
In May, a federal judge in Rhode Island excoriated lawyers from the Enforcement and Affirmative Litigation Branch at Main Justice in DC for their “appalling lack of candor.” This is a flashing red light that the institution Blanche leads is in crisis. And that crisis has made it impossible to hire and retain competent lawyers.
The Justice Department used to be the most prestigious law firm in America, able to recruit mid-career professionals from white shoe law firms. Now its been reduced to recruiting on social media after waiving the grade and experience requirements for new hires. Roughly 16,000 employees have left since Trump’s second term began, including nearly a thousand Assistant US Attorneys and the vast majority of the Civil Rights Division’s roughly 600-person career staff.
Several US Attorney’s offices now require nothing beyond a law degree and a bar card — plus a willingness to make terrible legal arguments in support of the president’s agenda.
Ballot tampering
Perhaps most alarming is Blanche’s willingness to interfere with the upcoming midterms.
In May, he endorsed Trump’s claims about election fraud in 2020, citing a “ton of evidence” that has somehow eluded every court and independent expert for the past six years.
Blanche’s department is suing states for full access to their voter rolls, thus far without success.
In Fulton County, Georgia, a court quashed a subpoena for poll workers’ personal information, found the statute of limitations on DOJ’s pet 2020-fraud theory had “long expired” and that the prosecutors pursuing it were “now unquestionably under the current President’s control” — after which the FBI fired two analysts who’d flagged the same investigation as thin and political. The Civil Rights Division sent election officials in all 50 states a letter threatening criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting. Blanche has even floated sending ICE agents to polling places (although he later denied it).
By voting to confirm him, Republicans are endorsing all of this. They are putting their stamp of approval on a Justice Department that investigates the president’s enemies, protects his friends, and treats every question of law as a question of loyalty first. It’s a grotesque perversion of America’s legal system, and it’s frankly beyond anything Roy Cohn could have imagined.
That’s it for today
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