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- [00:00]
A
Todd Blanche is in trouble. Hello, friends. I'm JBL here with my bulwark colleague and author of the Morning Shots newsletter, Andrew Egger. Andrew, on Capitol Hill today, they were supposedly going to start moving good old Todd Blanche, very strong, charismatic acting Attorney General, start moving him through the confirmation process, only to have things stopped at the last minute. Andrew, before we start, would you like to set the stage?
- [00:29]
B
Yeah. So what we have here, this is the guy who is obviously currently serving as the acting Attorney General. He's been that way since Pam Bondi was run out of town by the president earlier this year. But, but, but Trump has been trying to make it official. Trump has been trying to get his confirmation through the Senate. He has run into a perhaps surprising amount of resistance from a couple of senators. Not that surprising. We. Once you realize the very, very small concessions that these senators are trying to get out of Blanche, which, which Trump and the federal government seem disinclined to give them. But, but, but surprising. Just, just against the normal backdrop of, of GOP quiescence to everything that, that Trump wants them to do. But that all came to a head today. Blanche had his confirmation hearing two weeks ago. The, the committee, the Judiciary Committee was supposed to, to vote him out of committee today, but you have two senators who are saying, until we get a couple of these very small concessions, which apparently we haven't been able to get yet because of the White House, we're a no go on it. So Trump is punting.
- [01:34]
A
Those senators are Cornyn and Tillis, both of whom Donald Trump has driven out of political life. Is that fair to say?
- [01:44]
B
Yes, they are both lame. Ducked out. Cornyn lost his primary. He's a senator from Texas. Lost his primary earlier this year after Trump dangled an endorsement in front of him for months to make him do all kinds of embarrassing things and jump through hoops and try to rename interstates after the president and things like this. But then endorsed his primary opponent, Ken Paxton. Cornyn has now lost that primary. He will be leaving Congress next year, leaving the Senate next year. Same with Thom Tillis, who, rather than go through that whole song and dance, took the somewhat more dignified, although more defeatist approach of just retiring. Did not actually wait around for Trump to pick him. A primary challenger saw the writing on the wall there and said, I'm done. I will also be leaving next year of my own free will.
- [02:32]
A
And the sticking point here seems to be they want the weaponization fund to be put to bed officially. And the White House seems to want to say, yeah, okay, sure. But not actually put that in writing, correct?
- [02:52]
B
Yes. And I, to be honest, I have had a hard time wrapping my mind around this because it really did seem, during Blanche's confirmation hearing a couple of weeks ago and during some. Some testimony prior to that as well, that this thing had been put to bed, that the White House put up a trial balloon about this. This was a big part of Blanche's audition to be Trump's real nominee for the permanent post of Attorney General is that he shepherded this Anti Weaponization fund through. I assume people remember this unless. Unless you were either living under a rock or refresh them.
- [03:23]
A
We've had 87 scandals since then.
- [03:25]
B
I know you found your mind, like, bludgeoned, you know, completely insensate by all this other shit that's going on. But the Anti Weaponization Fund, if you do or don't remember, was this unbelievably corrupt and appalling deal that Blanche and company put forward to settle a personal lawsuit that Trump had brought against the IRS in his personal capacity that would have created this gigantic pot of federal money to do payouts, a slush fund to people who had claims that they had been wronged by the, quote, unquote, weaponization of the Justice Department under President Biden. And what that primarily meant was the President and his family and people around him, even though the president personally would have been barred from collecting from this directly, but, you know, people in his orbit who felt like they had been unjustly prosecuted for crimes, and then even more obviously, January Sixers, people who stormed the Capitol at his behest and command, you know, in order to stop him from no longer being the president, in order to stop the 2020 election from being certified, and who then correctly found themselves prosecuted, and many of them found themselves jailed because they'd been convicted of the crimes they committed and in connection to that riot and to that insurrection attempt, not only did these people get pardoned as soon as Trump came back into office, every single one of them, even those who had assaulted Capitol Police officers and things, but according to the plan of this Anti Weaponization fund, which was launched, it wasn't just planned. It was announced, launched, they were moving forward with it. These people would have been eligible for financial taxpayer restitution for the pains that. For their troubles, essentially for the pains they had suffered. Blanche pulled the plug on this after it became clear not. Not only that there was going to be a lot of GOP resistan resistance to. To this plan ever happening. In fact, there were a lot of. There was a lot of talk about even creating new legislation to block this thing from ever going into effect. But not only that, he quickly, kind of quickly became clear to him that it was imperiling his own possible future confirmation. And so he told the Senate at a couple different points in his testimony, just kidding. We're. We're shelving this. We're putting it on mothballs. You're never going to have to worry about it again. And that seemed to be the end of it until now, until Blanche came back around to Congress to get the votes that he needed in the Senate for this confirmation. He only needs 50 votes. And found out that a couple of these senators wanted a little more than just him saying in a congressional hearing that they had no intention of reviving this fund. He wanted a written declaration. They both wanted a written declaration from the Justice Department that this fund would not be moving forward. Uh, as opposed to just. No, we're not planning on that right now. And apparently, apparently, this is something that matters enough to some important people in the White House that they are willing to keel haul their own. Their own Attorney General nomination rather than give what, by all appearances, should be just one more practical reassurance of this thing that they have supposedly already abandoned. So it's just a crazy situation, basically, any way you look at it.
- [06:38]
A
Let's hear from John Cornyn.
- [06:39]
C
If this were just between me and. And Todd Blanche, we would have worked this out, but apparently he's getting some pushback from higher ups at the White House. I don't know who, but this doesn't need to be this hard.
- [06:55]
A
What have you heard from the White House, and what have you heard from the Justice Department?
- [06:58]
C
Well, we made. They. They made a proposal last night. We made a counter proposal proposal. And we thought we basically had met in the middle, but heard this morning that that was all off.
- [07:10]
B
So he doesn't want to put it in writing.
- [07:12]
C
Is that what it is? That's basically it, yeah. And it's what he testified to under oath. So it's not like this is something new and different. And it causes me concern, if they don't want to put it in writing, that this is not something that is going to be enforceable in the long term.
- [07:28]
A
I. I just have one question for you, Andrew. How does putting it in writing make it enforceable? I mean, Bobby Kennedy said a whole bunch of things under oath, and he went back on all of them. The Trump administration signed a deal with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the House of Saud, to begin selling nuclear stuff to them so they can begin their civilian nuclear program. And then after they signed the deal, the Trump administration was like, no, actually they have to recognize Israel too. And Saudi's response was, yeah, you know, I'm sorry, bro, we signed the deal. There, there ain't no renegotiation. It's right here. We got the paper. But that doesn't mean they're going to get it right. I mean, the idea that, well, we signed a piece of paper with Donald Trump means that it's over. Is he stupid?
- [08:22]
B
Yeah, I mean, I totally take your point on that. I guess the counterargument is like, what else could you expect to get? Like, what would be better than better than that? It seems to me that you're not
- [08:32]
A
going to get anything and so don't confirm him. That's why if what you care about is this, like, if you care about this, then the answer is, no, we're not going to confirm you.
- [08:41]
B
And that is the funny subtext of all of this, right? Is it's like, it's not just that this anti weaponization fund is or would be bad if it were real. It is also so psychotic that the plan was ever thought up, that it was ever launched, that it was ever like the brainchild of this man, Todd Blanch, to be like, you know what I think the President would really go for, that would really make him want to put me in this job permanently, is if I, if I did this insanely corrupt deal and that, that all these guys, including Tillis and Cornyn, are willing to basically say, well, you know, I'm not going to hold it against you that you tried to shove this down our throats. I just want, I just want the tiniest little bit of reassurance that you won't try to do this exact one again.
- [09:26]
A
I want you to promise. Promise. You want to. Well, we're okay with all the Epstein cover up stuff. Well, okay with the fact that you're the President's lawyer. We're okay with, you know, like, we're going to come up with one thing that you could satisfy us with to make it look like we held your feet to the fire when I just. Andrew, what do they care? They hate Donald Trump. Donald Trump hates them. Is nobody in Washington motivated by spite anymore?
- [09:57]
B
It's so surreal to see a guy like Cornyn who is like, you know, your sort of typical, like, deals oriented legislator who loves to get in there and, you know, hash out an omnibus or, or whatever. He spent a lot of time in GOP leadership and he's talking about this deal like, like you talk about that, like, you know, like, oh, we've got this, this little bit of distance between us on marginal tax rates or on, or on this piece of policy or on that piece of, you know, you know, that, that different trade apparatus or whatever. And we got in the room last night and we thought we were pretty close. And then this morning they came back and we're not as close as we thought we were, but we think we're going to get there. But what we're talking about is giving money to people who beat up police officers on January 6th. I mean, like, so far through the looking glass on this stuff. It's crazy, right?
- [10:43]
A
The other half of this, Andrew, is the promise of immunity, right, for future prosecutions against the Trump and his family for the irs. Anyway, about an hour after the the Cornyn interview we just saw, we got a Truth Social tweet from Donald J. Trump. I'll, I'll read it for you. Friends, Todd Blanche is a star and everyone knows it. He has the potential to go down as one of the greatest attorney generals of all time. However, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both of whom I refuse to endorse and whose political careers have been ended by my action, are refusing to vote for this great nominee who will remain in any event as acting. Remember, both Cornyn and Tillis voted for Merrick Garland and others too numerous.