Carl P. Leubsdorf: Blanche is the true test for Senate Republicans

Reports of a Republican congressional revolt - like Mark Twain once famously said of a false newspaper report of his death - are greatly exaggerated.

It’s true some GOP senators spoke out against President Donald Trump’s choice of the unqualified attack dog Bill Pulte as national intelligence director and his proposed “slush fund” for rewarding people prosecuted by the prior administration.

But when it came time to vote their expressed concerns, as usual, they folded.

And while a few Republican lawmakers in both houses joined Democrats in urging Trump to get congressional approval before continuing his unauthorized war against Iran, their votes were primarily symbolic.

Now, however, the Republican-controlled Senate has a chance to do something more than symbolic by rejecting Trump’s nomination of his former lawyer, Todd Blanche, as attorney general.

Blanche’s actions as acting attorney general alone provide multiple reasons to reject him. It would take fewer than a half-dozen GOP senators, along with virtually all 47 Democrats. In an administration rife with corruption and abuse, Blanche is one of its chief enablers.

It’s not just that he was Trump’s personal attorney before becoming the Justice Department’s No. 2 official. After all, other presidents appointed AGs with whom they had close personal ties, from John Kennedy’s choice of his brother Robert to Richard Nixon’s choice of his campaign manager John Mitchell to Barack Obama’s pick of his friend Eric Holder.

But unlike them, Blanche was intimately involved in the legal problems Trump faced while he was out of the White House. Then, he dealt with them in office.

Here are some of his worst abuses:

The Epstein cover-up

His ousted predecessor Pam Bondi told the House Oversight Committee that Blanche “was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.”

That makes him responsible for the department’s failure to comply fully with the law, passed by Congress and signed by Trump, requiring release of all the documents from the federal investigation of convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

So far, critics say, only half of the 6 million pages have been released, and more names and actions were redacted than was necessary. Bondi denied that, saying, “To my knowledge, they’ve all been released.”

Blanche also made the deal with convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell that included her transfer to a minimum security prison.

Political prosecutions

Bondi was ousted, in part because the White House said she failed to move aggressively enough in prosecuting Trump’s enemies.

Blanche hasn’t made that mistake. Soon after he became acting attorney general, charges of threatening the president were filed against one of Trump’s principal targets, former FBI Director James Comey. The reason: an Instagram post showing seashore shells arranged to form the numbers “86 47,” a configuration the indictment interpreted as a threat against the 47th president.

Blanche also stepped up the investigation of whether an array of former Democratic officials, including Comey and former President Barack Obama, sought for political reasons to create the investigation into possible connections between Trump’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

He ousted the career prosecutor running the Miami-based probe and installed Joseph di Genova, a former U.S. attorney in Washington and an outspoken critic of the Russia investigation. But a prior probe by Trump’s first term Justice Department found only minor irregularities in the Russia investigation.

The “slush fund” and the Trump tax settlement

Blanche oversaw the highly unusual arrangement by which the government agreed to settle Trump’s $10 billion suit against the Internal Revenue Service for the unauthorized leak of his tax returns in return for creating a $1.776 billion fund to compensate victims of Biden-era prosecutions. It also provided Trump, his family and his businesses with sweeping immunity from all tax audits and prosecutions.

The creation of the so-called weaponization fund, which among others could have compensated the hundreds of pro-Trump demonstrators who ransacked the Capitol and attacked police officers in the Jan 6, 2021, insurrection to overturn the 2020 election result, drew such sharp GOP criticism that Blanche announced it would not be implemented.

But he said the government would proceed with the tax benefits for Trump, something The New York Times noted Sunday would normally be handled by the IRS, not the Justice Department. The federal judge in the case, who initially dismissed Trump’s suit, then said she was considering if further legal action was required.

Rewriting the Jan. 6 history

The Justice Department has begun purging from its files the records of prosecutions against the Jan. 6 demonstrators. The day he took office, Trump pardoned all who had been convicted or were still being prosecuted. Prosecutors who brought the charges have been fired. It’s all part of an effort to rewrite history to reframe the assault against the government as a pro-democracy demonstration.

Despite their criticism of the weaponization fund, Republican senators last week prevented a Democratic move to bar it, after allowing several GOP senators facing difficult election fights to vote for the ban.

The attorney general is supposed to be the people’s lawyer, not the president’s lawyer. But Trump made clear during his campaign he wanted someone who would follow his orders, something Bondi eagerly embraced.

Senators will press Blanche on his intentions at his confirmation hearings. Whatever he says, however, he is likely to keep doing Trump’s bidding from his suite at the Justice Department, just as he did while on his payroll in private life.

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This story was originally published June 10, 2026 at 8:30 AM.