Blanche has numerous and unresolvable conflicts of interest with anything involving Trump

 let (Freudian) slip the dogs of war

• Public Citizen 

  citizen.org

  From:president@citizen.org

  
  

  To:m.mk@...

  Fri, Jul 17 2026 at 2:02 PM

  Todd Blanche — Donald Trump’s nominee to be the next attorney general of the United States — appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee this week.
  
  Here are the words that actually came out of Blanche’s mouth — under oath, on live TV — when asked a softball question by a MAGA-friendly senator about his relationship with Trump:
  
  “I’m his lawyer.”
  
  Talk about a Freudian slip!
  
  Blanche subsequently tried to correct himself, saying “was his lawyer.”
  
  But of course it’s no accident that Blanche initially answered the way he did — which, in a welcome change of pace for someone in the Trump regime, was at least truthful — because both he and Trump have made it clear that they see his function as that of the president’s personal legal attack dog.
  
  Here are just a few of the numerous reasons why Blanche — who is currently in the role of “acting” attorney general — should be rejected by the Senate Judiciary Committee:
  

  • Under Blanche, the DOJ continues to willfully withhold millions of documents in flagrant violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act.

  • Blanche created the preposterous “anti-weaponization” slush fund — which would have transferred $1.8 billion of our tax dollars to assorted MAGA crooks and cronies — to “settle” Trump’s bogus lawsuit against his own IRS. And Blanche refuses to put in writing that the fund has been terminated and will not be revived in any fashion.

  • The same “settlement” purports to give Trump and his family sweeping, unprecedented immunity from tax investigations.

  • Trump fired Pam Bondi as attorney general back in April — reportedly because she didn’t do enough to prosecute people Trump considers his “enemies.” That’s really saying something given how much of that she actually was doing. Alarmingly, it appears that Blanche is even more willing to weaponize the law.

  • Just days after Blanche personally visited Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, the convicted child sex trafficker was moved to a minimum security facility.

  • As Trump’s former personal lawyer — including in Trump’s election obstruction cases, the classified documents case, and the Stormy Daniels “hush money” case (where Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts related to falsifying business records, giving him the dubious distinction of being the only U.S. president ever convicted of a felony) — Blanche has numerous and unresolvable conflicts of interest with anything involving Trump.

  Blanche is so manifestly unfit to be attorney general that even some Republican senators may be hesitating to advance his nomination out of committee to a vote by the full Senate.
  
  
  Thanks for taking action.
  
  For justice,
  
  - Lisa Gilbert & Robert Weissman, Co-Presidents of Public Citizen
  
  
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