Trump Searching for a Way Out to Confirm Blanche

Cornyn and Tillis disgrace themselves

Donald Trump had stubbornly refused to let weak-kneed Republican senators figure out a workaround to confirm acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) were locked in a bizarre negotiation last week to tweak Trump’s slush fund — partially for insurrectionists — and his tax immunity scam as the price for confirming Blanche. Fixing blatantly illegal and unethical deals was supposed to grease the skids to confirm him, despite Blanche’s role as a chief architect of the Jeffrey Epstein file cover-up scheme, plus repeated instances of unethical conduct that have sullied the department’s reputation.

In what was surely one of the most demeaning “negotiations” ever undertaken by a U.S. senator, Cornyn struggled to extract a DOJ promise to limit Trump’s tax scam as the price for confirming Blanche. Trump resisted, threatening to yank the nomination and leave him in the acting role. (It is unfathomable why that, which would have spared the Senate from enabling another grossly unfit nominee, would have been so objectionable.) No matter how much Cornyn struggled to let Trump have his lackey as the permanent AG, Trump kept pulling the rug out from under him, leaving Cornyn whining, “They know what they need to do, but they simply refuse to do it.”

On Friday, Trump vented his anger at the dissenting senators and, worse, appealed a federal court judge’s ruling dismissing a scam lawsuit designed to bless his slush fund and tax-immunity scheme for Trump and his family. It did not take long for Tillis to figure out that Trump had effectively conceded that the “so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund is still alive, which is exactly why we are attempting to formally end it.” As the New York Times reported, the appeal “would also have a more practical effect: rolling back the judge’s efforts to seek disciplinary actions against Mr. Trump’s personal lawyers and Mr. Blanche and other department officials.”

By Saturday, Trump seemed determined to prove Cornyn and Tillis’s concerns correct, reviving his earlier threat to leave Blanche as acting AG so he could keep his slush fund and immunity. “Despite comments as late as yesterday that the fund is dead, President Trump clearly intends to resurrect the payout pot for punks either by inappropriately establishing another bogus fund or pushing Congress to vote for a bill that the majority of Republicans in the Senate would be against,” Tillis responded on social media. By Sunday evening, however, it appeared Blanche had struck a deal to dump the slush fund and curtail the immunity scheme.

All but MAGA sycophants have figured out the game here. Conservative attorney Andy McCarthy aptly observed:

The irony is that Todd Blanche can’t be confirmed for the very reason that he shouldn’t be confirmed: He is willfully running interference for something tawdry that President Trump is insistent on doing under the guise of Justice Department authority, namely, establishing the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund. An attorney general fit for the job would resign rather than be a part of that.

Trump’s antics had been a finger in the eye to Cornyn and Tillis, to the Republicans in the Senate stuck defending the objectionable nominee, and most of all to the Epstein survivors. Cornyn and much of the legacy media seem to think he is exercising some sort of admirable judgment by leading the charge to hold out against a slush fund and immunity deal (that could well be voided by a subsequent Congress and/or president or challenged in court). In a jaw-dropping expression of intellectual dishonesty and moral vacuity, Cornyn maintained his negotiations were “about making sure that we maintain the integrity of our justice system.” Really? Confirming the man prepared to violate the Epstein Files Transparency Act and who signed off on the deals Cornyn cannot stomach would “maintain the integrity of our justice system”? It’s hard to imagine a more damning revelation of his lack of any moral compass.

Finding a “solution” to fix a corrupt bargain Blanche helped author obviously will not redeem Blanche’s intellectual or moral deficits, and, more to the point, would treat the Epstein survivors, once again, as collateral damage. Squabbling over the immunity deal is not some sort of principled stance, but rather a cynical ploy to elevate Blanche.

Let’s not forget the essential reason to reject Blanche: his role in tormenting Epstein survivors to serve his boss’s personal interests. In a letter to the two senators, a group of them previously declared, “Both of you have records of standing with survivors of human trafficking and sexual assault. A vote to confirm Todd Blanche would be a vote against those survivors.” As they aptly put it, confirmation would “reward someone who has refused to take responsibility for the harm they have caused, failed to provide meaningful answers and shown no credible commitment to pursuing the full truth.” It matters not one whit whether Trump also retains his corrupt tax immunity deal.

In sum, finding an “out” to confirm Blanche (which now seems all but assured) would only slam the door shut on any accountability for Epstein enablers (including Trump’s minions) and the corrupt Trump DOJ that has bottled up evidence. In evaluating this entire despicable exercise, let’s dispense with the plaudits for Tillis and Cornyn, who have doggedly tried to facilitate a deal to ram through the most morally objectionable AG nominee in history.

And while we are taking stock, let’s not forget that nearly all other Republican senators have supported Blanche, demonstrating their own unfitness for office, contempt for the rule of law, and utter disregard for not only those who Epstein sex trafficked but for all such survivors — who will now think twice or three times before coming forward to implore authorities to investigate the predators who traumatized their lives.

If Blanche gets through, no one would have any doubt that the DOJ under his watch will be nothing more than Trump’s personal vendetta machine — a crumbling shell of its former self, and a disgraceful symbol of the Trump regime’s attack on democracy, the rule of law, and simple decency.