President Donald Trump on Thursday said he would consider withdrawing his nomination of Todd Blanche to be US attorney general if two Republican senators refused to vote for his confirmation.
However, Trump indicated in a social media post that this would only be a temporary retreat, as he vowed to renominate Blanch, who had previously served as the president’s personal attorney, after Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) are out of office when their terms at the start of next year.
Cornyn and Tillis said they would not vote to support Blanche unless he assured them that the DOJ under his leadership would not reconstitute the widely criticized $1.8 billion slush fund created for allies of the president who were supposedly hurt by the “weaponization” of the department under former President Joe Biden.
The Republican senators also want limits on Internal Revenue Service audit protections for Trump and his family, which were proposed as part of a deal to settle the president’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.
In a Thursday interview with NOTUS reporter Igor Bobic, Tillis expressed bewilderment at Trump’s refusal to rule out restarting the slush fund, which he said was damaging the Republican Party’s chances of holding onto Congress in the 2026 midterms.
“It makes no sense to me,” Tillis said. “This is not popular. The president’s not winning on this issue. It is killing some of our candidates because they can’t explain it. And now it looks like they weren’t being honest when they said it was inoperative.”
Trump critics urged the Senate to permanently bury Blanche’s aspirations of becoming attorney general. (Blanche currently serves as acting head of the Justice Department.)
The social media account for Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee called on the US Senate to “reject this dangerous nomination for good and demand an attorney general who serves the Constitution and the American people, not Donald Trump and the Epstein class.”
“Todd Blanche sealed his fate by refusing to disavow Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund for cop-beating MAGA foot soldiers,” the House Judiciary Democrats noted, “or retract his family-sized super pardon for the Trumps and all their businesses.”
Joel Payne, chief communications officer for MoveOn Political Action, said that Blanche’s nomination deserved to be killed “because his record is corrupt and indefensible.”
“He has spent his career proving that there is no legal principle he will not bend and no institution he will not compromise in service of Donald Trump,” Payne said. “His blind loyalty, willingness to use the justice system to protect the president, and role in a sweetheart settlement benefiting Trump make him completely unfit to serve as attorney general.”
Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, labeled Blanche “unequivocally unfit to serve” as attorney general, as he “has enabled corruption at the highest level of government by not only permitting, but actively encouraging lawlessness, conflicts of interest, and the prioritization of the interests of the president over the interests of the American people.”
“In postponing the vote, it is clear that Blanche’s nomination is hanging by a thread,” Gilbert added. “Trump should concede defeat and revoke Blanche’s nomination immediately. His personal fixer must not helm the DOJ.”
According to conservative legal analyst Ed Whelan, it’s likely that Trump could allow Blanche to continue running the DOJ indefinitely in an acting capacity given that the US Senate already confirmed him to be deputy AG.
“It’s not at all clear that the time limit under the Federal Vacancies Reform Act applies to a Deputy AG who is serving as Acting AG,” Whelan wrote in a social media post. “And in any event, Blanche in his capacity as Deputy AG has virtually all of the powers of the AG. So the reality is that whether or not Blanche is confirmed as AG, he can continue to run DOJ indefinitely.”
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