'Blatantly Lawless and Unethical'
After today’s damning court decision in the Minnesota case, more on the high stakes of the Blanche nomination
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As the nomination of Todd Blanche to become the next attorney general is pending, a federal judge issued an extraordinary decision affirming the systematic abuses of power by the Department of Justice in which Blanche has served in leading roles. On the basis of “overwhelming” evidence, the district court found that the department had initiated a retributive federal criminal investigation of Minnesota officials, including the state’s governor and the mayor of Minneapolis, because they declined to support the administration’s immigration policies. It determined that subpoenas issued to these officials lacked “a single plausible” justification but instead were motivated by the goals of unconstitutionally coercing the state’s cooperation and retaliating for its refusal to do so. The court granted these officials’ motion to quash the subpoenas.
The court noted the personal involvement in this case of Blanche, who was deputy attorney general at the time. He was active in a public media campaign of allegations that state officials may have committed crimes in withholding the cooperation that the administration demanded. Among other comments, Blanche claimed that, in their opposition to Trump’s immigration enforcement policy, the governor and mayor had engaged in “terrorism.” The department he led in the second-most-senior position then launched what the court concluded was “a blatantly lawless and unethical use [of] the grand jury process.”
The court noted that this episode was in no way singular, but “played out against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s well-established history of using criminal investigations to retaliate against and pressure the President’s political and personal adversaries.” And, remarkably, because the administration has pursued this weaponization in flagrant fashion, the court could simply rely on “news reports and other publicly available sources” in reaching its decision in the particular case of Minnesota.
I have recently written that “The Senate is responsible for the sorry ethical state of affairs at DOJ, having looked the other way when confirming Blanche the first time.” It chose to confirm a deputy attorney general who was one of Trump’s key personal lawyers and who would not commit to standard requirements for recusal, for clear reasons of conflict of interest, from matters involving his former client. The Senate has since seen how the department with Blanche as deputy AG has eviscerated the application of recusal principles and dismantled the process for enforcing these and other ethical rules.
Now a court decision calls attention to the “Trump administration’s well-established history of using criminal investigations to retaliate against and pressure the President’s political and personal adversaries” and to Blanche’s leadership role in that history.
A second confirmation of Todd Blanche, this time to the position of attorney general, would represent a validation of this model for the Department of Justice. The question now is whether the Senate will look the other way once more, and fatefully so. The most responsible action would be the speedy scheduling of confirmation hearings and vote to reject the nomination: a clear statement about what the United States Senate expects, on a bipartisan basis, from the Department of Justice.