Confirm Todd Blanche and You're Confirming a Police State

If you want to know how fascism comes to America, it will be, of course, wrapped in a flag and wielding a cross, as Sinclair Lewis apocryphally said. But it will need a Department of Justice that decides its mission is to be the Department of Prosecuting the President’s Imagined Enemies. And that department will have to be led by a man devoid of any values except his belief that his boss should get away with anything. And his boss’s opponents? Nothing.

Donald Trump has that man. Todd Blanche.

Why Bother Confirming a Man Who You’ve Already Stuck Us With

Former U.S. Pardon Attorney Liz Oyer has laid out the institutional case against Blanche and why we, the people, must rise up to reject Blanche’s nomination to Attorney General. But it’s important to understand that this battle is entirely symbolic. Legal scholars generally believe that Blanche, like Joe Biden’s acting Labor Secretary Julie Su, could serve the remainder of his term without Senate confirmation.

“I like acting,” Trump told reporters back in January 2019, about a different round of acting Cabinet secretaries. “It gives me more flexibility. Do you understand that? I like acting.”

So why did he send Blanche’s nomination to fill the vacancy left by Pam Bondi when she was shown the revolving door for not successfully prosecuting Trump’s political targets or, more so, protecting Trump from his vast connections to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell? As a reward.

For what? Politico reported:

“He’s doing everything that he’s supposed to do, racking up wins,” a senior White House official told POLITICO last week.

The official, granted anonymity to discuss personnel issues, pointed to Blanche’s Tuesday announcement of the indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is facing fraud charges, calling it “a huge win” and “one of the most significant things that DOJ has done during this term.”

The ‘Win’ Trump Is Rewarding: Indicting the Group That Bankrupted the Klan

Prosecutors have taken the SPLC’s decades-long practice of paying informants to infiltrate the groups it investigates — including, the indictment alleges, a member of the leadership team that organized the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, paid roughly $270,000 over eight years — and built an 11-count indictment charging wire fraud, bank fraud, and money laundering around it.

The SPLC prosecution, along with the targeting of Act Blue, offers the clearest example of the Trump regime attempting to weaponize the law to create a one-party fascist state: an organization that helped bankrupt the Klan at the beginning of the Civil Rights movement, and that honestly called out Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA as being the epitome of how America’s right had become dominated by “authoritarian, patriarchal Christian supremacy dedicated to eroding the value of inclusive democracy and public institutions,” is now facing decades in federal liability for the informant network that did the actual work of infiltrating the Klan.

But it’s important to understand that the rot of the Department of Prosecuting the President’s Imagined Enemies under Blanche, who Oyer explains was running the machinery of the Department as Bondi preened, is the most direct application of authoritarianism or fascism or whatever you want to call it: a regime built to assault equality under the law and the First Amendment.

Prosecuting Protesters, Not the Agents Who Kill Them

In Minnesota last week, U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen indicted fifteen people he called members of “antifa groups that violently opposed the enforcement of federal law,” releasing the indictment to reporters fifteen minutes before his press conference and answering nearly every question about its substance with “you’ll find the answer in the indictment.” Read the document and the violence disappears. The “manner and means” of the alleged conspiracy include moderating a meeting, sharing a fundraising link, posting on social media, and repeatedly sending a Signal message.

The only injury alleged anywhere in ninety-four pages is a knocked-out hand holding an agent’s notes. Rosen tied the case directly to the White House’s post-Charlie Kirk order naming “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, a designation that does not exist in law for a domestic group, and to a deputy attorney general’s task force called Joint Task Force Vanguard, built to “investigate, prosecute, and disrupt those who engage in political violence and intimidation.”

Nobody at that press conference asked Rosen about political violence from the other direction. Federal officers shot two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, dead in Minneapolis in January, and the deputy attorney general himself, Todd Blanche, has already decided which “crimes” get investigated. The Civil Rights Division is reviewing Pretti’s killing. Not Good’s. “There are thousands, unfortunately, of law enforcement events every year where somebody is shot,” Blanche told reporters. The department does not investigate all of them. How many of them happen when the president sends a legion of marauders to a city in order to score political points and terrorize people who didn’t vote for him?

Prosecutors Have a ‘Credibility Crisis,’ and a Judge Said So

An FBI agent swore in an affidavit that Demond Edwards, 18, hit a law enforcement officer in the face and body with his fists. There is video. In the video, nobody throws a punch. A man with a gun is straddling Edwards. Edwards slides out from between his legs and stands up to run. The man with the gun turns, points, and Edwards drops.

That is what U.S. Magistrate Judge Keri Holleb Hotaling watched this week, in a case out of Country Club Hills that prosecutors in Chicago had already used to charge four people with attempted robbery. The video surfaced after the charges were filed. The line prosecutor did not see it until Tuesday. His bosses had known about it for a week. Once he watched it, he moved to drop the case the same day, telling Hotaling the footage “called into question portions of the evidence that was sworn out” and that the complaint “needs to be dismissed in its entirety.” Hotaling released the video over the objections of prosecutors and the ATF, dismissed the charges without prejudice, and scheduled a July 2 hearing to consider sanctions against the federal government. “This court is very concerned that I cannot rely on the information that is provided to me,” she said, “either from the U.S. attorney’s office or from agents.”

She is not the only judge who has said that out loud this month. Three weeks ago, a different federal judge used the phrase “credibility crisis” to describe the same office after allegations of prosecutorial misconduct collapsed the case against the “Broadview Six,” a group of Operation Midway Blitz protesters. Days later, the office dropped a fraud case tied to Loretto Hospital rather than face an evidentiary hearing into the same alleged misconduct by the same prosecutor. Two of the four lawyers who tried the office’s marquee ComEd bribery case have left since an appeals court threw out the convictions this month. From a massive bribery trial to local fraud, that’s three collapsed cases and a full-blown credibility crisis for a single office in one season.

In Chicago, a sworn account didn’t survive any honest person watching the video. In Minnesota, a sworn charge didn’t survive contact with its own page count. Different documents, different prosecutors, a thousand miles apart, and both kept going until a judge or a journalist forced them into daylight.

Neither office got caught by accident. Both got caught because someone outside the building still checked the work. Nobody has shown Blanche personally directing either office, but we are adults who know how this regime operates; the choice about whose death gets investigated, his choice, is the one fact in this piece with his fingerprints on it. What connects Chicago and Minnesota to Blanche goes deeper than a paper trail: it is an Attorney General whose own conduct teaches every U.S. Attorney underneath him exactly what gets rewarded and what gets ignored.

DOJ Is Paying Signing Bonuses Because Nobody Good Wants the Job

The entire Department will, by necessity, become a law firm that reads Trump’s Truth Social feed as if it were the Bill of Rights. Which is why DOJ is already scraping the scum at the bottom of the barrel and waving stacks of cash to find staff willing to work for Blanche.

On July 15 and 16, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold hearings on whether Todd Blanche should serve as the Justice Department’s permanent leader. Blanche spent most of the last three years as Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer, representing him in three of his four criminal cases. The case against that promotion does not need to dig into fifteen months of his disgraceful track record. Five will do.

Five Reasons the Senate Should Say No

1. The Comey Prosecution He Can’t Explain

Start with Jim Comey. Blanche’s deputies pushed Virginia prosecutors and the Secret Service to criminalize Comey’s Instagram post about seashells; Secret Service investigators interviewed Comey, found him fully cooperative, and concluded there was no case. North Carolina prosecutors revived it months later, and Blanche credited the indictment to “career agents and prosecutors” without mentioning that other career officials had already rejected the same case twice. That omission now hands Comey’s lawyers a vindictive-prosecution claim, as Marcy Wheeler laid out at emptywheel.

2. The IRS Addendum That Reads Like a Pardon

Then there is the money. Blanche signed a one-page addendum declaring the IRS “forever barred” from auditing Trump, his family, and his businesses, buried inside the settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against his own government over his own leaked tax returns. Wheeler called it what it is: an attempted pardon. The same settlement spawned a $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund that, Blanche admitted under Senate questioning, could legally pay convicted January 6 police-assailants. Sen. Thom Tillis, no liberal, called the scheme “stupid on stilts.” A federal judge ordered Blanche and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to declare under penalty of perjury, by June 19, that the fund is actually dead. The deadline arrived Friday. The Justice Department filed a five-page argument that signing such a declaration would raise “serious separation of powers concerns” and pointed instead to Blanche’s earlier promise that the fund is “not going forward, period.” Blanche has used the exact phrase “not moving forward” almost a dozen times, never once saying the fund is dead, canceled, or over. Tillis now says he has a “slush fund issue” with Blanche, and he sits on the Judiciary Committee that must approve him.

3. The Bribery Testimony That Excuses the President

Then there is the bribery testimony. Rep. Joe Morelle asked Blanche under oath whether paying a president a million dollars for a pardon would break the law. Blanche said yes. Asked whether the president could be prosecuted for taking that bribe, Blanche said no, only impeached, a position that contradicts the actual text of Trump v. United States, the immunity ruling Blanche has spent the year hiding behind, as Wheeler documented. He told Sen. Chris Van Hollen under oath that he had “never read the Washington Post,” yet Wheeler found he had filed Washington Post and New York Times reporting as exhibits in Trump’s 2023 motion to dismiss. Either he lied to Congress, or he built a legal argument on sources he never opened.

4. The Epstein Files He Helped Bury While Fluffing Maxwell and Trump

Then there is Jeffrey Epstein. Blanche personally interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell for 9 hours, granted her limited immunity to do so, and then approved her transfer to a more comfortable, minimum-security facility. The co-conspirator records his department eventually released arrived redacted into uselessness. Reporting this month described a panicked Situation Room meeting in which Blanche helped the White House manage what officials called the “Epstein firestorm,” rather than release what investigators had actually found. When Trump nominated him for the permanent job, Rep. Deborah Ross put the whole nomination in one line: Blanche is “Trump’s lawyer, not the people’s lawyer.”

5. The ‘Roadblocks’ He’s Building Against the Next Administration

None of this is secret. Blanche told NewsNation that he is installing “roadblocks” within the department to prevent a future administration from prosecuting Trump. He urged young lawyers at a Federalist Society conference to treat skeptical judges as enemies in an ongoing war, a remark that drew a public rebuke from 50 former federal judges.

Republicans Can Only Afford to Lose Four Votes

And the man installing the roadblocks cannot count on the Senate majority that is supposed to wave him through. Trump needs nearly every Republican vote to confirm Blanche, and he keeps spending the votes on other things. The same week Blanche’s hearing date was set, Trump derailed his own majority leader’s plan to revive an expired surveillance law and confirm a national intelligence nominee, announcing the delay overnight on social media hours before the nominee was set to testify. Senate Republicans tried to attach Trump’s voter-ID priority to an ICE funding bill this month and lost, 48 to 50, after four of their own defected.

At least five Republican senators, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Thom Tillis, John Cornyn, and Bill Cassidy, are seen as possible votes against Blanche, either out of personal spite for Trump or political convenience (Collins). Republicans can afford to lose four. The New York Times editorial board counted the senators Trump has burned badly enough to plausibly vote no and called the list “plenty long enough to defeat Mr. Blanche.” Cassidy says he still needs proof that Blanche is “the attorney general who used to be the president’s personal attorney” and not the other way around. Cornyn just wants a promise that Blanche will follow the law, a bar Blanche has spent more than a year failing to clear.

Yes, Blanche can keep running the Justice Department as acting Attorney General whether or not the Senate confirms him. A rejection will not remove him from power. It will do something else: force fifty-three Republican senators to say, on the record, whether the conduct above is who they want running the federal government’s most powerful law enforcement agency. That vote is not symbolic. It is the only check left.

What You Can Do Before July 15

The Senate has less than a month before that hearing. Use this 5calls link to contact your senators. Tell them what any honest person can’t help but see, even though they are… Republican Senators. Tell them to reject Todd Blanche, or step into the abyss with our eyes open, because by now nobody can claim they weren’t told. And because when Blanche comes for them, which he will for any of the president’s targets eventually, they’re going to need every ally they can get.

Because we all know what’s coming from a Justice Department that believes its job is to side with and pay off the men who used a flag and a cross to beat in police officers’ faces because those officers happen to be standing in Donald Trump’s way.

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