Todd Blanche continues to make a mess of his life. He has a judge waiting for Epstein information. He is supposed to have his AG confirmation hearing tomorrow. Neither one of these is going very well for him. Blanche just keeps digging himself into that hole every single day. He’s going to run out of rungs on his ladder if he’s not careful. And he’s making a lot of us look up case law online with every fumble he makes. Well, at least it’s educational. With appreciation for Raw Story:
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche ran into “trouble” Wednesday when a Republican senator, key to his confirmation, suddenly scrapped a meeting just before a federal judge’s deadline for unredacted Epstein files, according to new reports. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee hold only an 11-to-10 majority, a margin thinned by the death of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — holdouts are Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), who just abruptly canceled the meeting. “Blanche nomination in trouble with committee vote slated for tomorrow,” Politico’s Sarah Ferris reported.
Two for the price of one for Mr. Blanche. He would probably prefer it to be good news, but it isn’t. Blanche has to bring in some of the Epstein files, unredacted, to show a judge tomorrow. This is a judge getting very tired of all the pussyfooting around a simple FOI lawsuit. It’s very simple, and Blanche won’t show them. It could have been very simple for Blanche, and instead he’s dragging it out. Then there’s the meeting he was supposed to have with Senator Cornyn that fell through. What did (or didn’t) happen to make Cornyn cancel the meeting? As you can see above, the majority is very close in that committee. More subterfuge enters the picture.
The confirmation crisis lands one day before Blanche has been ordered to turn over unredacted Epstein files to a federal judge. Reporter Jim Acosta tied Cornyn’s cancellation directly to efforts from Epstein survivors to prevent Blanche’s confirmation. “After a disastrous confirmation hearing, Blanche met with Epstein survivors at the behest of Cornyn and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), hoping to secure their votes, “wrote Acosta. “That meeting was also a disaster, and the survivors began lobbying even harder against Blanche’s confirmation.”
Now Blanche faces mounting pressure on the matter as a deadline looms. U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered Blanche to hand the files — documents the Justice Department redacted and claimed covered victims’ names and the names of law enforcement personnel — by 3 p.m. Thursday, the same day Republicans want to hold the confirmation vote, according to a court order. “The judge isn’t accepting what the government has represented to it as truthful, and is requiring documentation to support its claims,” former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance wrote.
Blanche is going to have a tough time sleeping tonight. He has two “big things” tomorrow. At the same time. It’s challenging. He’s going to have to see if he can get one rescheduled. Not sure if this can be done. He’s already in hot water with Cornyn, and it seems to be getting hotter as time goes by. And he *has to* present the information to the judge, who is likely sick and tired of him. We should find out in the news tomorrow as to how it worked out. We’ll see if he speaks to Cornyn, which is pretty critical. Blanche is going to have a busy day.
Both Cornyn and Tillis want confirmation that the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund — created as part of Trump’s settlement with the IRS — is permanently dead, and that the Trump family’s immunity from future tax audits is narrowly limited. New York Times correspondent Glenn Thrush reported that the DOJ refused to provide a written declaration confirming that Trump’s tax-immunity deal was dead, prompting Cornyn to cancel his morning meeting with Blanche. Tillis had previously made Blanche’s meeting with Epstein survivors a condition of his support.
Tillis is firmly in Cornyn’s corner. There is “no daylight” between them, he said. Grassley pointed to the two Republican holdouts when he was asked Wednesday whether he would need to reschedule the hearing. “You’ll have to ask Tillis and Cornyn about that,” Grassley said, Ferris reported. A delay could push Blanche’s confirmation past the August recess and into the fall, Raju reported.
It’s not necessarily a bad thing to have Blanche’s confirmation pushed out. It would give us more time to see what he’s going to do. We should be intensely interested in this court case. Blanche has to provide unredacted documents to the judge. Will he or won’t he? We all know why Trump is screaming about redactions, and they aren’t going to push out the other half of the documents. Scream and cry if they must, but the law is the law, no matter what Trump says. Sending out the batch where the victims were NOT redacted was infuriating! It was as if someone said, “Hey, world, here they are, survivors of Epstein, and do you want to have some fun?” The possibilities are endless, and they are not in any way nice. They may have to go “underground,” and that’s some bullsht. Ok, rant aside, whether or not Blanche shows up and hands the unredacted pages of the Epstein files or not will tell us how this is going to go, and we’ll take it from there.
See you tomorrow!
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I suspect he’s stalling on turning over the Epstein files because he knows they will prove him wrong. Just my guess.
By the way, I am more than fed up with these clowns being able to worm out of things like this. I hope that doesn’t happen this time.