The Todd Blanche Confirmation Will Be About Everything and Nothing
Source: The Dispatch · Bias: Center Right
Summary
The Senate can’t stop Blanche from serving out the remainder of Donald Trump’s term, but that’s no reason it should bless the president’s contempt for the rule of law.
The Todd Blanche Confirmation Will Be About Everything and Nothing
Center Right
The Senate can’t stop Blanche from serving out the remainder of Donald Trump’s term, but that’s no reason it should bless the president’s contempt for the rule of law.
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz on Sunday blamed former President Biden for the Pentagon being low on munitions but denied that the depletion is negatively impacting the war with Iran. “We have to take a step back here in that a lot of stockpiles were depleted not only from what we gave…
Those who most covet the job of attorney general may not be worthy to have it. The best candidates are willing to resign from the department in its defense.
Lawyers predict ‘more suppression and no active investigations’ but victims’ groups determined to continue fightAs Donald Trump’s former defense lawyer Todd Blanche appears poised for confirmation as attorney general, numerous Jeffrey Epstein survivors have sounded the alarm that a US justice department helmed by him would derail their pursuit of justice.In a letter urging Republican senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn to reject his nomination, these survivors said that Blanche’s handling of the Epstein case as acting attorney general was characterized by misstep after misstep. Continue reading...
Top House Democrat says US president ‘failed to deliver’ on campaign promises to lower costs and avoid overseas warsDonald Trump’s Republican party has “nothing to run on” for the congressional midterm elections after the president broke promises to lower costs and avoid starting war overseas, Hakeem Jeffries has said.The House minority leader, a New York congressman, made those comments on CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, exactly 100 days from the 3 November midterms, when Jeffries and his fellow Democrats are aiming to take control of the US House and Senate from their Republican opponents. Continue reading...
President Donald Trump is going to be the main issue in the 2026 midterms, but experts disagree as to whether the impending electoral disaster will be experienced by the Republicans or the Democrats. Now an election expert is shedding light on the situation.“It’s a competitive situation in both the Senate and the House,” DDHQ’s chief elections analyst Geoffrey Skelley told The Hill's Julia Mueller on Sunday. He later added that “the big question is: will the Iranian conflict … will people being concerned about that ratcheting up, is that going to create reverberations in things like the generic ballot that signal ‘OK, Democrats’ advantage is growing again’?”Skelley also pointed out that Democrats’ lead increases when there is bad news about Iran and gas prices go up, but shrinks when the conflict subsides and gas prices drop.“The challenge for Republicans is the Iranian conflict is heating up again,” Skelley argued. Mueller reported, “Democrats are favored to win the House but are slight underdogs in the fight for the Senate with 100 days to go before the midterms, according to the latest forecast from Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ).”She added, “Both parties are dealing with headwinds as they head into the home stretch of the high-stakes election.” While Republicans are worried about the Iran war, oil prices and lingering high inflation, Democrats have their own internal issues with which to grapple.“Wins by democratic socialist and antiestablishment candidates in House primaries across the country have sparked concerns from centrists that their party will be characterized as too extreme,” Mueller reported. “It’s a line of attack being emphasized by President Trump and GOP leaders in Washington working to convince voters not to hand power to the Democratic Party.”She continued, “The result is a situation 100 days out that gives both parties reasons to be hopeful and worried.”The polls are similarly concerning for the Democrats.“At this point in the 2018 cycle, when Democrats won big in the so-called blue wave, the generic ballot showed Democrats up by an average of 7 points or 8 points, DDHQ said, which is double the current edge,” Mueller wrote.She added, “With just more than three months until Election Day, the tight forecasts make races like the Michigan Senate fight must-wins for both parties, adding urgency to the handful of toss-up contests that could decide control on Capitol Hill.”The New York Times similarly reported on Democrats’ perceived incompetence on Sunday.“At the center is Ken Martin, the 53-year-old party chairman, who has found himself increasingly isolated, gripped by the fear that he will lose his job and relying on a vanishingly small circle of people he trusts, according to interviews with more than two dozen Democrats, including current and former D.N.C. officials and members,” wrote The New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher and Reid J. Epstein on Sunday. “Most of them spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the party’s troubled state of affairs.”Goldmacher and Epstein continued, “Mr. Martin’s fraying nerves are showing. In a pique of frustration in early July, he threw his phone at the desk of a junior aide while upbraiding the person. The phone-tossing incident resulted in a formal complaint to the D.N.C.’s human resources department.”
A federal judge's “unexpected” demand to Attorney General Todd Blanche regarding the Epstein files proves a bedrock judicial principle is “on life support," a legal expert argued Sunday.Federal Judge Emmet Sullivan gave Blanche five days to provide the court with unredacted versions of certain Epstein-related files for private review as it litigates a lawsuit filed by lawyer and media figure Katie Phang. Phang sued Blanche for allegedly violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act by unlawfully redacting certain files.Blanche provided the court with an explanation as to why certain files were redacted, but Sullivan, doubting Blanche’s explanation, demanded he provide proof supporting his claims. Such a demand, as noted by Joyce Vance, former U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama, demonstrated how the Trump administration had all but gutted the key judicial principle known as the “presumption of regularity.”“It was commonly used to advance the idea that in the absence of evidence to the contrary, courts should presume government employees, including DOJ lawyers, acted properly in the execution of their duties. Now it’s on life support and Judge Sullivan’s order is another nail in its coffin,” Vance wrote in an analysis published Saturday on her Substack.“This most recent order suggests that Judge Sullivan doesn’t believe the government when it says something is the case, even when that ‘something’ is as simple as the identity of the person in a ‘to’ line in an email. But the government has acted like it has something to hide, even after Congress passed the Transparency Act and Trump signed it into law.”Specifically, Phang has raised doubts that redacted names on a handful of Epstein-related files were lawfully withheld. The Justice Department (DOJ) has claimed the redactions in question were permitted under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, but Sullivan is refusing to take the DOJ at their word.“So the Judge isn’t accepting what the government has represented to it as truthful, and is requiring documentation to support its claims,” Vance wrote.“Under any other president, the Attorney General would have been disturbed by the suggestion prosecutors couldn’t be trusted. There would be disciplinary review. But here, the acting Attorney General is the defendant in the case. It’s paradigmatic of how far DOJ has fallen.”
MS NOW anchor Katy Tur and panelists tried to puzzle through President Donald Trump’s tone-deaf reaction to voters’ economic suffering, but the conclusion they reached was that Trump doesn’t care to please voters. Instead, he has other plans.New Yorker writer Susan Glasser pointed out that Trump appears criminally unaware of polls and incapable of adjusting his behavior on expensive tariffs or the inflationary results of his Iran war to help either himself or his party in November.“… Trump's policies are extremely unpopular,” said Glasser on a Friday’s “Moment with Katy Tur,” explaining that his historic lows are worse going into the midterm elections than in his first term. “Even in Trump's first term, he was personally polarizing and unpopular. But a lot of people had the view that this former businessman was somehow going to be good for the economy. And consistently people would say, ‘well, maybe I don't like him, or I'm not sure, but he's been good for the economy,’ and that helped to float him through … a politically problematic moment of his first presidency. This time, what you have is a situation where, again, he's very unpopular. Over 60 percent of voters in many polls right now are saying they don't approve of his job as president, but even more of them don't approve of the job he's doing on the economy.” This includes more than Democrats and Republican leaning independents, Glasser added. Even Republicans are softening on the president on the crucial question of the economy.“And trump is giving them almost nothing,” Glasser said. “Not only is he raising prices, in effect with his policies, he has taken to saying affordability is a made-up hoax. He says the Democrats invented this word and it's not even true. It doesn't mean anything. And, you know, it's not a very good way to get the voters empathy if you're saying basically ‘stop whining.’”“I get you on that,” said Tur. “It's not just that … he doesn't want to admit that affordability is a problem or is something that Americans have been concerned about for a long time. It's the optics of what he's focused on and what he's doing physically in some spaces as well.”Tur then played video of Trump’s gilded Oval Office, taken by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino.“It's like Louis XIV vomited all over the Oval Office,” said Tur. “I mean, I honestly think … Louis the 14th would look at this and say, ‘this is too much.’ There is so much gold in this room that that I don't know who he thinks he's impressing by this because the American public, if they're telling everybody that their top concern is affordability, if they're being asked to pay more for Donald Trump's war, they're being asked to pay more for his … tariffs, etc. Everything is going up. And they look at the White House and this man is obsessed with pasting gold medallions to everything, optically I don't understand that.”“Why do it,” demanded Tur. “If you say he believes he just has this faith in tariffs, fine. But then why add to all of that by turning the Oval Office into a gilded mausoleum, and then also telling everybody that affordability is a hoax?To this, Glasser said Trump has no cause to win votes of popularity among American voters because he plans to snatch power through other means.“Trump has become very expert over his decade in power in the Republican Party, at repeating lies over and over again. And the fact that he's ceding the ground now so far in advance of the election this fall and already saying ‘it's rigged’ before anyone's ever cast any vote, I think that's what we need to pay attention to, frankly,” said Glasser. - YouTube youtu.be
