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Todd Blanche is Roy Cohn ... but worse
Republicans own the orgy of corruption that will follow their vote to confirm him.
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“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump wailed in 2017, after Jeff Sessions heeded his ethical obligation to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
The president demanded an attorney general in the mold of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s famously ruthless sidekick, one who would subordinate every professional, moral, and legal obligation to his boss’s needs. All his predecessors had enjoyed this privilege, Trump insisted, conveniently ignoring the fact that Attorney General Janet Reno let independent counsel Ken Starr run roughshod over Bill Clinton, and Trump would likely have lost in 2016 if FBI Director James Comey had been on any kind of presidential leash.
Nine years later, Trump has finally found his Roy Cohn, but with a prodigious aptitude for sycophancy substituted for the personal demons.
“I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche simpered in April after his predecessor Pam Bondi got pushed out. “And if President Trump chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I’ll say, ‘Thank you very much, I love you, sir.’”
Roy Cohn never got to run a federal law enforcement agency, but the degradation of the Justice Department that began during Bondi’s tenure has only accelerated under Blanche’s leadership. The organization has shrunk in both numbers and esteem, as competent prosecutors are pushed out and judges decry the flagrant abuse of the judicial process perpetrated by the government.
This week, the Senate will get a chance to weigh in on Blanche’s performance, with hearings today and Thursday before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Barring something very unexpected, they will vote to confirm Blanche as permanent attorney general, blessing the chaos that will follow.
Republicans order the shit sandwich
As they typically do when the president serves up a shit sandwich of corruption seasoned with a healthy schmear of self-dealing, a handful of Republican senators are pretending that they might not give Trump what he wants.
Sen. Thom Tillis, who is retiring next year, has the power to sink Blanche by deadlocking the vote to advance him out of the Judiciary Committee.
Last month, Tillis made some mouth noises about requiring Blanche to hold firm on January 6 rioters. In fact, the DOJ has been working assiduously to do the opposite. Just last week, they forced a federal judge to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of several Proud Boys gang members.
Tillis still hasn’t said how he’ll vote, but after meeting one-on-one with Blanche in June, he announced he had “a positive predisposition” toward the nominee. His only reservation is about the “Anti-Weaponization” slush fund that Trump and Blanche cooked up to “settle” a lawsuit against the IRS.
Blanche claims the slush fund, which earmarked $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for Trump’s supporters, is DOA, although he refuses to put it in writing. But an immunity deal to protect Trump and his family from prosecution for tax crimes, worth perhaps $100 million to Trump personally, remains in force.
