Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee is in trouble.
What’s happening? Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, whom Trump nominated for the permanent job last month, was set to receive a committee vote on Thursday on his way to being confirmed. Instead, lawmakers are punting on the vote after multiple key Republican senators expressed concerns — and Trump is now threatening to pull Blanche’s nomination until next year.
Why are senators worried about Blanche? Nearly all of Trump’s nominees — even his most controversial picks, like HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth — have been confirmed by the Senate.
But Blanche, who is also Trump’s former personal lawyer, has a track record as acting attorney general, where he’s primarily distinguished himself by his unflinching devotion to Trump’s personal priorities: things like indicting former FBI director James Comey, creating a vast $1.8 billion slush fund to reward Trump’s allies, and immunizing the president and his family from scrutiny by the IRS via an unusual settlement deal.
Not all of those schemes have gone well; the slush fund, for example, went down in flames in June.
The IRS shield, however, is still kicking, and Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and John Cornyn (R-TX) — both of whom sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee — are pushing Blanche to commit to changes to the settlement before they will support his nomination. So far, that hasn’t happened.
What happens if Blanche’s nomination fails? It’s a black eye for Trump and a sign that the GOP, facing an increasingly dire midterms outlook, is growing less willing to go along with Trump’s increasingly conspicuous corruption. But a defeated vote or a pulled nomination won’t actually end Blanche’s tenure as acting attorney general — since he was previously confirmed by the Senate for the deputy attorney general job, he can likely stay in the acting role as long as Trump wants to keep him there.
