What happened during attorney general confirmation hearing? : NPR

Todd Blanche, President Trump’s pick for attorney general, faced tough questioning — from Democrats and some Republicans — over issues that have dogged the Justice Department for the past 18 months.

Blanche, currently the acting attorney general, had won Senate confirmation early in Trump’s second term to serve as deputy attorney general. But after facing hours in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday, Blanche’s confirmation to the top job is not assured. He needs the support of all Republicans for the nomination to clear the committee.

While Blanche remained composed throughout the hearing, there were a handful of testy moments during questioning. Here are three takeaways:

The anti-weaponization fund is dead. Kind of?

Earlier this year, a $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund was established as part of a settlement with Trump to end his lawsuit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns.

After bipartisan pushback, Blanche proclaimed the fund dead and said that no money would be paid out. But a part of the settlement that protects Trump, his family and his businesses from IRS audits of past tax returns remains in place.

A federal judge on Monday blasted the DOJ over the settlement and especially the anti-weaponization fund, saying it was an attempt to use the court to legitimize an attempt to “earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”

Blanche tried to move past it, saying the issue was moot, but the fund remained a hot topic among the senators Wednesday morning.

When questioned about what role he played in making the deal between Trump and the IRS, Blanche maintained that he did not participate in the negotiations directly but engaged in conversations about settling the IRS lawsuit.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, whose concerns over the deal could tank his support of Blanche, scrutinized key provisions of the agreement with the help of an enlarged poster board.

Cornyn noted that based on the language of the deal, Trump “has not agreed in writing” to officially kill the fund, and that the settlement is still a deal that is an enforceable contract — which Blanche confirmed.

Blanche said, “[Trump’s attorneys] could try to enforce the contract. They can’t force the Department of Justice to move forward with the weaponization fund. They could potentially say, I suppose, that we breached [the contract] by not moving forward.”

But, he quickly added, he had not heard about any push to do that.

To “stick a fork in this turkey” of a fund, Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina suggested that Congress should consider codifying the end of the anti-weaponization fund into law.

That is something the DOJ could get behind, Blanche said.

Tillis was one Republican who appeared hesitant in backing Blanche prior to the hearing. But in concluding his questioning of the acting attorney general, Tillis told him: “You’ve done a great job today.”

Blanche faces accusations of working for Trump, not the people

Louisiana Republican Sen. John Kennedy asked Blanche: “Are you and President Trump friends?”

Blanche responded, in what may have been a slip of the tongue, “I’m his lawyer — was his lawyer. And now I’m the deputy attorney general.”

Before Blanche was acting attorney general or deputy attorney general, he was Trump’s personal attorney, representing the president in multiple criminal cases, including the federal classified documents and election obstruction cases.

Blanche’s comments gave an unintentional nod to an ongoing concern from Democrats that his personal relationship with Trump affects his ability to serve the American people.

The IRS lawsuit settlement did not help assuage those concerns. Neither did attempts to pursue prosecutions against political foes like former FBI director James Comey.

“This casts a shadow over any ideas of independence,” Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said as he questioned Blanche on his ethics.

Throughout the hearing, Blanche defended his track record at the department. He said DOJ has succeeded in efforts to combat violent crime, fight fraud, to arrest drug cartels, child abusers and gang members.

A couple of times Blanche also worked to distance himself from Trump’s actions, including issuing pardons for Jan. 6 rioters.

Blanche said he didn’t celebrate those pardons but that, under law, his department had to dismiss criminal cases against those individuals once the president issued those pardons.

Epstein files continue to give Blanche, and the DOJ, heartburn

Criticism over the department’s handling of the Epstein case is an unrelenting shadow following Blanche and other members of the administration.

A handful of victims of the convicted sex offender sat behind Blanche during the hearing.

The DOJ, specifically, has faced heavy criticism for not releasing all documents related to Epstein, and then missing deadlines to publish the records, and finally, when it did release the records, for failing to properly redact a number of victims’ private information and photos. Separately, Democrats slammed the department and its Federal Bureau of Prisons for moving Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, to a prison camp and out of a maximum security prison.

The administration has been roundly harangued by members of both parties for a perceived lack of transparency on this issue. It’s an assertion Blanche strongly pushed back against during the hearing.

“The Biden administration did nothing to be transparent about the Epstein case,” Blanche said. “We have been extraordinarily transparent in not only producing the records but letting unredacted versions be available to anybody in this body.”

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, the committee’s ranking member, shot back that it took a bipartisan Congress to pass a law to force the administration’s hand to release the documents.

Durbin pushed Blanche to agree to meet with 10 of Epstein’s victims within 30 days. Blanche wavered, saying the women can meet with a staffer who’s been working on those cases; he maintained that he couldn’t meet with them because they’re represented by counsel. (Sen. Booker later in the hearing called that claim “utter nonsense.”)

Blanche ultimately did say the DOJ had always been open to meeting with the victims. And he did take responsibility for the “mistakes that were made” related to the failed redactions within the files.

“Whenever we learned that any victim’s name had been improperly not redacted, we immediately took the document down and fixed it as soon as we could. That doesn’t excuse the mistakes of which I take responsibility, but it does mean that we tried to fix them.”