Confirmation hearings in the modern era are largely exercises in evasion. Senators deliver speeches disguised as questions. Nominees repeat rehearsed assurances. Everyone leaves carrying the opinion they brought into the room.
By that contemporary standard, the confirmation process for Attorney General nominee Todd Blanche did something unusually useful. Instead of producing answers about his independence from the president, it produced a real-time test of it.
At issue was an extraordinary arrangement, which Blanche signed, resolving President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS. It purported to grant sweeping protection from existing tax claims to Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization, and to create a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that could compensate people claiming to have been persecuted by the government—including, potentially, Trump’s political allies and January 6 defendants.
The arrangement was not merely controversial. Critics questioned whether it was legally binding at all, and even after Blanche narrowed its scope, the remaining tax protections could still be worth tens of millions of dollars to the president and his family.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, who is presiding over the case, dismantled both the lawsuit and the settlement it produced. She found that the suit had been brought for an “improper purpose.” This was not, she concluded, an ordinary lawsuit between genuinely adverse parties. The president was effectively suing an administration he controlled. She rejected the government’s attempt to present the resulting agreement as the product of an ordinary adversarial proceeding. She noted that the settlement outline bore only Blanche’s signature, even though the Justice Department purported to represent the government against the president.
In the Senate, the arrangement that got such rough treatment from judge Williams was a double test of Blanche’s independence. Did he put the president’s interests and those of his allies above his duty to the law and Constitution?
That independence matters because the attorney general leads a department powerful enough to shield a president and his allies from the law—or turn the law against their enemies.
This weekend, we saw the conclusion of an episode that illustrates the danger of what happens when law enforcement becomes an instrument of the president’s passions in the department Blanche is asking to run outright. After president Trump blamed “vandals” for the Reflecting Pool’s peeling liner, federal authorities charged former Olympic canoeist David Hearn with felony property destruction. Prosecutors have now moved to dismiss the case, acknowledging that the damage resulted from a rushed, botched installation—not vandalism. The government’s own filing acknowledged that the evidence no longer supported the vandalism theory. The machinery of federal law enforcement advanced far enough to put a man under felony indictment before the evidence stopped it. Even then, the president didn’t concede the point—he told reporters the damage was still “VANDALS,” contractor problems notwithstanding.
Blanche was not a nominee being asked to speculate about some future conflict between presidential loyalty and the law. His signature was already on such a conflict.
Blanche, the president’s former personal lawyer, helped create the arrangement, publicly defended it, and then called the fund “dead” while declining to rescind the order that had created it. When Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn demanded that he put his assurance into binding form, he resisted. Only when they placed his confirmation in jeopardy did he issue the written order they had demanded.
That sequence is more revealing than any hearing exchange. Blanche’s conduct tracked the location of leverage. Blanche had already shown how he would behave when presidential loyalty collided with the impartial administration of justice.
As of this week, the senators have gotten a concession. What they have not gotten is any indication that the concession restrains anyone. Asked about the deal Monday, the president told reporters he hadn’t reviewed it — he understood there’d been a “sign-off,” he said, but didn’t know its terms, and waved off Blanche’s memo as simply restating things Blanche had already told Congress. Trump did not dispute that the fund was dead. He kept arguing for bringing it back.
The senators extracted a concession from Blanche. They did not extract one from the president. Trump continues to argue for reviving the fund, suggesting the pressure to restore it has not disappeared.
The ability to force a nominee into one concession is not evidence that he possesses the independent judgment required for the office in the future. If anything, the episode showed that Blanche responds to the person or institution holding the decisive leverage. First, that was the president. For a few crucial days, it was Cornyn and Tillis. Once Blanche is confirmed, the daily leverage returns overwhelmingly to the president, whose personal interests Blanche has already shown himself willing to accommodate with inventiveness.
Senators Cornyn and Tillis can reasonably claim that they used the Senate’s power to stop an abuse. But they are treating the resulting concession as if it erases the conduct that made their intervention necessary. In fact, that conduct is the evidence.
They are mistaking the success of their leverage for proof of Blanche’s independence—and are on the verge of voting to return the leverage to the president.
