Todd Blanche sits for confirmation hearing in bid for attorney general | Trump administration

Todd Blanche will testify before the Senate judiciary committee on Wednesday as one of Donald Trump’s most loyal and powerful enforcers in government aims to be confirmed as the nation’s top law enforcement official.

Few officials in Trump’s second term have been as effective as Blanche in the fight to transform the federal government. Trump appointed his former personal lawyer, Blanche, to be deputy attorney general, the justice department’s No. 2 position, at the beginning of his term; There, he oversaw the department’s day-to-day operations as career staffers were purged for their connections to the Trump investigations and the president directed the department to punish political rivals and investigate debunked conspiracy theories about the 2020 election.

After Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general in April, Blanche began serving as acting attorney general, where she amplified Trump’s revenge agenda.

Blanche is likely to face tough questions from Democrats over actions such as firing career prosecutors for their work on anti-abortion cases, charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with misleading charges, and filing criminal charges against former FBI director James Comey for a display of seashells on the beach that read “86 47” (get rid of Trump), among other issues.

Blanche ran a department where prosecutors and other government lawyers were reprimanded for making false statements before judges. Government lawyers have long enjoyed a “presumption of regularity”—the assumption that officers have acted ethically and honestly before the courts—but that now appears to have evaporated.

For Blanche, her candidacy for attorney general represents the culmination of her decision to bet everything on Trump less than five years ago. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor, left her partnership at the Cadwalader law firm in 2023 to represent Trump in criminal cases against him. Blanche, who until recently was a registered Democrat rewarded for his loyalty to a senior post in the justice ministry.

Blanche is also likely to face tough questions about the department’s decision to vacate some of the most serious convictions starting Jan. 6 and the deal the government reached with the president to end a $10 billion lawsuit over the leak of tax returns. The deal approved by Blanche called for the creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund to compensate victims of alleged government arming and gave the president, his family and related business entities unprecedented immunity from tax audits until a deal was reached.

“In your less than 18 months at the Justice Department, you have shown that you are, first and foremost, still President Trump’s personal lawyer. Your tenure can be summed up in just four words: ‘I love you, sir.’ “When you were asked what you would say to President Trump, this was your answer,” Dick Durbin, an Illinois senator and ranking member of the senate judiciary committee, said in his opening statement Wednesday. “This nation deserves an Attorney General who loves the Constitution more than the President. An Attorney General who is focused on keeping Americans safe and fighting corruption, not settling personal grievances and filling bank accounts of the crook-in-chief. Mr. Blanche, you have proven beyond any doubt that you are not that person.”

Facing bipartisan backlash, Blanche canceled the fund. And on Monday, a federal judge condemned Blanche and the president’s other lawyers for the deal, saying the original lawsuit was collusion and was filed to engineer the president’s preferred outcome.

Senators are also expected to press Blanche strongly on her handling of the release of millions of files related to Jeffrey Epstein. Beginning last year, the department released a trove of documents, but many of them contained sloppy and haphazard redactions in which the names of Epstein’s victims were made public and the names of others associated with Epstein were kept secret.

In May, Bondi, in testimony before lawmakers on the House oversight and reform committee, acknowledged there were “redaction errors” in the Epstein files but said “this department has been committed to accountability and transparency since day one of this process.”

During the same statement, Bondi said that Blanche was the one “responsible” for the justice department releasing the files.

Ahead of Blanche’s trial this week, several Epstein survivors posted a video and put up billboards urging senators not to confirm him.

In an interview with the Guardian last month, Annie Farmer, a survivor of Epstein’s abuse, said she and other survivors were “very clear” that Blanche “should not have been attorney general”.

“It really depends on a few things,” he said. “Pam Bondi was very clear that Todd Blanche was the person who led the effort to release the files, and she did not take responsibility for the mistakes that were made, she was clear that she did not plan to do any investigation into the leads included in the files, and I would say she was dishonest about her efforts to involve survivors.”

Blanche also made headlines last year when she met Ghislaine Maxwell, a long-time friend of Epstein’s who is now serving in the military. 20 years imprisonment in prison to interview him about the Epstein case on sex trafficking charges.

Shortly after the meeting, Maxwell transferred From a low-security federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas. The move sparked backlash; experts called it “unprecedented” and Democratic lawmakers noted that convicted sex offenders are not typically placed in minimum-security facilities.

You have Blanche defended He argued that the transfer was necessary for Maxwell’s safety.

No one else connected to Epstein has been charged.

In May, during an exchange at a Senate hearing, Blanche was asked if she could commit not to offer clemency for Maxwell. “Yes, of course I can commit to that,” he replied.

More than 1,200 former justice department employees signed a letter I opposed Blanche’s confirmation earlier this month.

“Since his confirmation as deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche has shown time and time again that his guiding star is loyalty to the president, not the constitution,” said Stacey Young, a former justice department attorney who is the founder and now executive director of Justice Connection, a group for justice department alumni who organized the letter.

“That loyalty led to the elimination of thousands of experienced career employees, a loss that will have a generational impact on the justice department’s ability to fulfill its mission and maintain credibility with the courts and the American people.”