President Donald Trump is trying to push through acting attorney general Todd Blanche to be his actual attorney general — but, as some conservatives are mocking, Blanche’s cause was undermined on Wednesday by a member of his own Republican Party.
Read more MAGA melts down after Republican gloats about ‘loser’ Trump
“[Sen. John] Kennedy [R-LA], in his weird kind of goofy way, as you say, caused much more trouble for Blanche then these Democratic lawyers asking their fine-tuned legal challenges,” conservative commentator William Kristol explained during a podcast for The Bulwark. Kristol was referring to how Kennedy asked Blanche if he considered himself to be Trump’s friend, only for Blanche to reply that he considered himself to be “Trump’s lawyer.” Legally, the attorney general represents the American people, not the president himself.
“Of course, he does think of himself as Trump’s lawyer, and that is a core point which underlies … a lot of the particularities of the decisions he’s made in terms of prosecutions and pardons and … Obviously the slush fund, right? So Kennedy, in his weird kind of goofy way, as you say, caused much more trouble for Blanche, these Democratic lawyers asking their fine-tuned legal challenges,” said Kristol.
Sam Stein, Kristol’s co-host, then broke down whether Blanche has enough support to get confirmed.
“Let’s talk about math here,” Stein wrote. “So Mitch McConnell’s out, which means there’s 52 senators. The late Senator Lindsey Graham’s sister is in, so it stays at 52, which means that it would take three Republicans to vote against Blanche to torpedo his nomination. I guess also the committee is at 11 Republicans, 10 Democrats. So if they can’t get a majority in the committee, he doesn’t get out of the committee.”
Yet even though Republicans may have enough votes to bring Blanche to the floor, they do not have the 65 votes to break a Democratic filibuster against Blanche’s permanent appointment.
“I don’t know the particularities of this,” Stein concluded. “So anyways, there are ways to defeat him.”
Later in the same broadcast, Stein and Bulwark contributor Will Saletan laughed at footage of Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) interrogating Blanche.
Read more Trump’s ‘hodgepodge of vanity projects’ is exhausting federal workers
“Who rejected the 25 defenses the IRS had to this sham lawsuit?” Schiff asked Saletan. “Who rejected them? Who said that these defenses, we’re not going to accept, we’re just going to go with the president’s agreement and the slush fund, and this immunity?”
When Blanche tried to deflect by saying there was a lot of internal conversation, Schiff pointed out that Blanche “made the decision to not defend the IRS and the Justice Department. You made the decision instead to sign this slush fund agreement.”
Blanche confirmed, “We made the decision to settle the case, correct, yeah.”
Schiff replied, “And in doing that, you basically decided that you were going to be the lawyer for the president and the lawyer for the IRS and the Justice Department.As the court found in this case, there was no adversarial relationship. The court found it was a sham. It was a collusive relationship.”
At this point, Saletan and Stein both snickered.
“What I don’t understand, Todd Blanche, [is] what happened to the Todd Blanche who was a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York?” Schiff asked in the hearing. “What happened to the prosecutor people had respect for? What happened to the prosecutor who once respected the rule of law? What happened to the prosecutor who said that there wouldn’t be a whiff of political partisanship and then prosecutes the president’s enemies over seashells, over making a video stating the plain law and constitution?”
Schiff is referring to the $1.8 billion slush fund that Trump and Blanche created — and which they claimed was dead, although they have not proven this — to settle the president’s lawsuit against the IRS. Trump accused the IRS of violating his rights when an independent contractor leaked that he had not paid taxes for many years and had a number of previously undisclosed business failures. Even though no one has ever received monetary compensation for having their tax returns leaked, and it was unclear whether Trump even had the standing to sue the IRS he controls, Blanche controversially refused to defend the IRS and instead settled with Trump for the $1.8 billion slush fund for Trump supporters and Trump-affiliated agencies, as well as to never audit the president or his family again.
Earlier this week U..S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams voided the settlement in a 56-page order in which she characterized the settlement as self-dealing on the basis of the fact that a sitting president sued an agency he controls, then settled with himself.
Read more George Will delivers blistering rebuke of Trump’s most ‘unstable’ loyalist
