{"id":509,"date":"2026-06-14T10:38:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-14T10:38:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=509"},"modified":"2026-06-14T10:38:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-14T10:38:08","slug":"why-todd-blanche-should-not-be-attorney-general","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=509","title":{"rendered":"Why Todd Blanche Should Not Be Attorney General"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Shortly before midnight on April 27th, two days after a gunman disrupted the White House Correspondents\u2019 dinner, the acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, submitted an extraordinary petition to a federal court that had blocked the construction of the White House ballroom. Despite the late-night filing in the case, which had been brought by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, there was no actual emergency; rather, the Department of Justice seized on the moment to make its case that security required the construction to proceed. Attorneys General do not ordinarily put their names on such filings, as Blanche had. But more astonishing was the language of the document: the United States speaking in the unmistakable voice of Donald Trump.<\/p>\n

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The motion began mid-rant: \u201c\u00a0\u2018The National Trust for Historic Preservation\u2019 is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE.\u201d It said that those seeking to stop the ballroom \u201csuffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome\u201d and \u201care represented by the lawyer for Barack Hussein Obama, Gregory Craig.\u201d Then it shifted to praising Trump\u2019s brilliance\u2014\u201ca highly successful real estate developer, who has abilities that others don\u2019t\u201d\u2014and to arguing that the ballroom was \u201cbeing given FREE OF CHARGE AS A GIFT TO THE COUNTRY!\u201d This claim was dubious; the President has unsuccessfully sought a billion dollars in government funding. Yet it was also unfiltered Trump, a Truth Social post in the guise of a legal document, and it was met with predictable failure. But although the document was submitted to Richard Leon, the U.S. district judge who had issued the injunction, Blanche was targeting a different audience of one.<\/p>\n

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In Trump\u2019s Washington, subservience works. Last Monday, the President formally nominated Blanche to be the nation\u2019s eighty-eighth Attorney General. Blanche, who had represented Trump in his criminal trials and was confirmed as Deputy Attorney General last March, has served in an acting capacity for more than eight weeks, since Pam Bondi was fired. He professed equanimity about getting the job permanently, announcing that, if Trump \u201cchooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, \u2018Thank you very much. I love you, sir.\u2019\u00a0\u201d But Blanche used the intervening weeks to engage in what has looked like a manic spree of auditioning for the top job.<\/p>\n

Blanche has touted one flimsy indictment (of the former F.B.I. director James Comey, for posting on social media a photo of \u201c86 47,\u201d written in seashells) after another (criminal charges against the Southern Poverty Law Center, for allegedly defrauding its donors). He ramped up a seemingly stalled criminal investigation into the former C.I.A. director John Brennan, enlisting Joseph diGenova, who had represented the Trump campaign in challenging the 2020 election results, to lead it. And he presided over the creation of a nearly $1.8-billion \u201canti-weaponization\u201d slush fund, supposedly to settle the Trump family\u2019s lawsuit against the I.R.S., for a private contractor\u2019s leak of tax records. This looting of the Treasury has apparently been averted, following a rare revolt by Republican lawmakers. But, for the Trumps, the most valuable benefit of the deal remains\u2014a Blanche-signed addendum stating that the federal government is \u201cFOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED\u201d from pursuing an I.R.S. audit that, according to the Times<\/em>, could have cost the family some hundred million dollars. (Asked about Blanche\u2019s tenure, a Justice Department spokeswoman offered a list of \u201ckey accomplishments,\u201d including a decrease in the national murder rate, the arrest of numerous alleged cartel members, the filing of multiple fraud cases, and the hiring of additional immigration judges.)<\/p>\n

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The Senate vote on Blanche\u2019s nomination to be Deputy Attorney General last year was 52\u201346, along party lines. But that was when his background offered the hope that he would stand up for the norms of Justice Department independence. He had been a registered Democrat until 2023, the Times<\/em> reported, and had worked for years as a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, the flagship U.S. Attorney\u2019s office. He was, former colleagues have said, no superstar, but he was reasonably well regarded and even better liked. The optimism that Blanche would be a moderating force, though, seems to have underestimated the corrupting power of ambition. News reports suggest that Blanche has at times urged restraint; if so, his successes appear to have been few, if any. He tolerated the firing of a respected prosecutor, Maurene Comey, for no other reason than her last name. In March, at the Conservative Political Action Conference\u2014not normally a venue for a Justice Department official\u2014he boasted of the wholesale ouster of F.B.I. agents who had worked on Trump prosecutions, saying, \u201cThere isn\u2019t a single man or woman with a gun, federal agent, still in that organization that had anything to do with the prosecution of President Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Last month, a federal judge in Tennessee, citing \u201cBlanche\u2019s vindictive motive,\u201d ordered dismissal of the indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the Justice Department had prosecuted after it removed him to El Salvador, his home country, in violation of a court order, and was forced to return him to the U.S. This month, in a podcast interview with Sean Hannity, Blanche not only discussed ongoing grand-jury investigations into a supposed \u201cgrand conspiracy\u201d among government officials to go after Trump but played along as Hannity named potential targets, from James Comey and John Brennan to the former director of National Intelligence James Clapper and President Joe Biden. \u201cAll those folks were certainly part of it,\u201d Blanche said. This is the antithesis of how prosecutors are instructed to behave. On Wednesday, the conservative National Review<\/em> came out against his nomination. \u201cTodd Blanche has been everything President Trump wants in an attorney general, and that\u2019s the problem,\u201d the editors wrote.<\/p>\n

A year ago, senators uncomfortable with the idea of Trump\u2019s criminal-defense lawyer becoming the department\u2019s No. 2 could point to Blanche\u2019s testimony before the Judiciary Committee, where he said that \u201cpolitical prosecutions should never happen, period\u201d and that, if pressed to bring a bogus case, \u201cI will follow the law.\u201d Now they have a record against which to judge those assurances. Will any of this matter to Republican senators\u2014perhaps to members of the growing \u201cwounded-bear caucus,\u201d who have been the targets of Trump\u2019s fury? A no vote from a single Republican on the committee could block the nomination. On the floor, just four Republican no votes could doom it. In a Senate that took its constitutional role seriously, Blanche would not win confirmation a second time. But, as John Thune, the Majority Leader, observed, \u201cobviously most of our members are pretty deferential to who the President wants.\u201d Like the nominee it will consider, this Senate is more inclined to consent to Trump than to advise him.\u00a0\u2666<\/p>\n

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In a Senate that took its constitutional role seriously, Blanche would not win confirmation a second time, Ruth Marcus writes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":508,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-comment"],"yoast_head":"\nWhy Todd Blanche Should Not Be Attorney General - City Relocation News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=509\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Why Todd Blanche Should Not Be Attorney General - City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"In a Senate that took its constitutional role seriously, Blanche would not win confirmation a second time, Ruth Marcus writes.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/cityrelocationnews.com\/?p=509\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"City Relocation News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-06-14T10:38:08+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"6 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=509#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=509\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3e7ce0c0c60d21e12a5ac61fb2b786d4\"},\"headline\":\"Why Todd Blanche Should Not Be Attorney General\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-06-14T10:38:08+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=509\"},\"wordCount\":1177,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=509#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/06\\\/5b8820dcf9f7ebccc382d1b74ebe72d5.webp\",\"articleSection\":[\"Comment\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=509#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=509\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/cityrelocationnews.com\\\/?p=509\",\"name\":\"Why Todd Blanche Should Not Be Attorney General - 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