Trump’s attorney general pick stares down Senate confirmation hurdles

President Donald Trump’s decision to nominate Todd Blanche as attorney general sets up a confirmation battle this summer that will test whether a handful of increasingly restive Republican senators are prepared to defy Trump on a high-profile nominee.

Blanche, who has served as acting attorney general since Trump ousted Pam Bondi as attorney general in April, played a central role in setting up a controversial $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who claim they were wrongly prosecuted or investigated. The move triggered a rare revolt by Senate Republicans over concerns that the fund could reward those convicted of attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

The administration backed down from its plans, but Trump has not ruled out reviving the fund. Some Senate Republicans remain concerned: a dozen of them voted last week to bar the use of federal funds for the fund, which failed on a procedural vote.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), one of the strongest Republican critics of the fund, said Blanche – Trump’s former personal defense lawyer – would need to reassure him before he could support Blanche.

“I have to be convinced that Todd is not the president’s personal attorney who happens to be attorney general, but that Todd is the attorney general who used to be the president’s personal attorney,” Cassidy told reporters.

The Republicans’ narrow Senate majority gives Blanche little margin for error. He can lose only three Republican votes if every senator is voting and all Democrats oppose him, as Sen. Dick Durbin (Illinois), the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he expected they would.

But it’s not clear whether Blanche’s nomination will make it to the Senate floor. The Judiciary Committee is expected to hold a confirmation hearing next month after the Senate returns from its July 4 recess. A single Republican senator could block Blanche in committee, preventing him from reaching the floor.

Two Republicans on the committee, Sens. Thom Tillis (North Carolina) and John Cornyn (Texas), have spoken out publicly against the fund. Tillis has also raised concerns about Blanche’s remarks regarding Jan. 6, including a speech that Blanche gave in April at the Conservative Political Action Conference in which he praised Trump’s pardons of Jan. 6 rioters.

Tillis has defied the administration in the past on nominations, blocking Ed Martin, Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, last year over Martin’s defense of Jan. 6 rioters.

Cornyn said Tuesday that he had many questions for Blanche, including about the fund.

“I have no red lines right now, but we’re going to have an interesting conversation,” Cornyn told reporters.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said Tuesday that Republicans would ensure that Blanche gets a fair hearing but did not directly answer when asked if Blanche has the votes to be confirmed.

“He’ll have to make his arguments,” Thune said on CNBC. “And I think the one thing that obviously people are paying a lot of attention to is this question around the weaponization fund and the questions that he’s answered around that already I would expect will continue to be a factor through the course of the confirmation process.”

Thune added that some votes have become harder for Senate Republicans now that “a few of these primaries have gotten behind us” – an apparent reference to Cornyn and Cassidy’s losses in their primaries last month after Trump endorsed their challengers. Cassidy quickly became more critical of the White House after losing, while Cornyn has been more cautious.

Blanche has an unusual background for an attorney general: He defended Trump in three of the criminal cases against him. Trump announced that he would nominate Blanche as deputy attorney general days after Trump was elected in 2024.

Critics argued at the time that Blanche would use his powerful position to serve the president instead of the public. But others pointed out that Blanche – a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York – had more experience than some of Trump’s other nominees. While serving as deputy attorney general was a leap, Blanche was a respected supervisor in the Southern District before leaving in 2014 for private practice.

The Senate confirmed Blanch last year as deputy attorney general on a 52-46 vote along party lines, giving Republicans hope that he can win confirmation again this time around.

“A year ago he was approved, and I don’t think anything’s changed,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters.

But Blanche has found himself at the center of the Justice Department’s biggest controversies as deputy attorney general, sometimes drawing criticism from members of his own party.

Bondi has said Blanche was in charge of the Justice Department’s heavily criticized release of files from the Jeffrey Epstein sex-trafficking case.

Blanche also personally interviewed Epstein’s imprisoned associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, over two days to determine if there was new information in the case that investigators had not previously uncovered. A week after Blanche’s interview, federal officials moved Maxwell from a federal detention center in Florida to a minimum security prison camp in Texas.

As acting attorney general, Blanche has moved aggressively to steer the traditionally independent Justice Department toward fulfilling Trump’s demands, including bringing controversial prosecutions against James B. Comey, the former FBI director, and the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Blanche was central to a deal to settle Trump’s outstanding legal claims against the federal government over the leak of his tax returns by creating the fund to compensate people who claim they are victims of politicized prosecutions. While he testified last week that the fund is dead, Blanche has defended another element of the deal that shields Trump, his family members and his companies from prosecution over past tax claims – a potentially lucrative deal for a president who has complained about IRS audits of his personal tax returns.

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement that Trump “has a great relationship with Todd and is very pleased with the job he’s done so far.”

Democrats have made clear that they will oppose Blanche’s nomination and use his confirmation battle to spotlight his role in creating the fund.

“There are billboard lawyers I’d trust more as attorney general than Todd Blanche,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Tuesday on the Senate floor. “Blanche was the mastermind behind the $2 billion MAGA slush fund to funnel America’s taxpayer dollars to Donald Trump and his MAGA cronies.”

But Republicans indicated that they are prepared for a confirmation battle for attorney general, which have become increasingly partisan in recent years. While President Joe Biden’s attorney general nominee, Merrick Garland, was confirmed 70-30 in 2021, only one Democrat – Sen. John Fetterman (Pennsylvania) – voted last year to confirm Bondi.

“Those hearings are always robust for an attorney general nominee,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), a member of the Judiciary Committee, told reporters. “We’ll see. I look forward to supporting him.”

–Reporting by Theodoric Meyer and Perry Stein, The Washington Post