President Trump has every right to select an attorney general who shares his policy views. Mr. Trump campaigned and won on a platform skeptical of environmental regulation, opposed to racial preferences and supportive of tough immigration enforcement, among other conservative policies. His attorney general will presumably share those views and lead a Justice Department that advocates them. Elections have consequences.
But Mr. Trump has no right to expect that the Senate will confirm an attorney general with a track record of disdaining the law and using law enforcement as a partisan weapon. Todd Blanche, whom the president nominated for the job last week, falls into this category. He has already damaged the Justice Department as a senior official there, and he has misled Congress. The Senate should reject his nomination.
Mr. Blanche served as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer in 2023 and 2024, defending him against two federal indictments and a New York hush money case. As acting attorney general since Pam Bondi was fired in April, and as deputy attorney general before that, he has continued to put Mr. Trump’s interests ahead of the nation’s. He pursued nakedly political indictments, including against James Comey, the former F.B.I. director. Mr. Blanche helped design a proposed $1.8 billion fund to benefit the rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and other Trump loyalists. He has spread falsehoods about the 2020 presidential election.
He personally signed an agreement that gives the Trump family and its businesses immunity from tax audits, which could save Mr. Trump $100 million or more. Mr. Blanche has pushed out dozens of F.B.I. agents and federal prosecutors for doing their duty by investigating the riot and other potential crimes. He has violated his own promise to recuse himself from matters in which he has a conflict of interest.
Mr. Blanche’s nomination presents a character test for Senate Republicans, who will soon have to vote on it. Several of them have recently displayed a degree of political courage by demanding the cancellation of the $1.8 payout fund and forcing Mr. Trump to move to replace Bill Pulte, the egregiously unqualified acting director of national intelligence. The pushback has been a reminder that Congress can influence presidential behavior.
In a healthier political climate, dozens of Republican senators would immediately pronounce Mr. Blanche unqualified for the job. In today’s political climate, the list of senators who may have the courage to do so is shorter, yet plenty long enough to defeat Mr. Blanche.
The group includes three senators whose political careers Mr. Trump has helped end: Thom Tillis of North Carolina, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas. It includes Mitch McConnell, who is also leaving Washington, and Rand Paul, both of Kentucky. It includes Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska. Ms. Collins is campaigning for re-election this summer by insisting that she can stand up to Mr. Trump. This nomination offers an easy test of that vow.
Mr. Tillis probably has the ability to end the nomination on its own. He sits on the Judiciary Committee, where a single Republican opponent could prevent the nomination from coming to the Senate floor. This spring, he helped force the end of a phony Justice Department investigation of Jerome Powell, the former Federal Reserve chair. With Mr. Blanche, Mr. Tillis has not yet shown similar courage.
Mr. Blanche has disqualified himself in at least four ways:
He has celebrated the Jan. 6 rioters who violently attacked police officers and the Capitol. When speaking to a conservative group in Texas in March, he boasted about the Trump administration’s friendly treatment of those rioters. “If you look at what happened to the men and women convicted because of Jan. 6, by 5 p.m. on Jan. 20, every one of them was either pardoned or had their sentence commuted, OK?” he said, to applause. “So when folks say you’ve done nothing, I say you have a very short memory.”
Mr. Tillis should pay particular attention to that speech. He has said that the most important test for Mr. Blanche was whether he ever described as righteous the rioters who beat up police officers. If Mr. Blanche came “even close to saying that,” Mr. Tillis said he would vote against him.
Mr. Blanche has misled Congress while testifying under oath. During his nomination hearing last year to become deputy attorney general, Mr. Tillis asked him whether he would promise that none of the department’s investigations would be politically motivated. “I’ve got your commitment there will not even be a whiff of an investigation that appears to have a political motivation to it?” the senator asked.
“I commit to that,” Mr. Blanche answered.
He has broken that vow repeatedly. When the president has asked the Justice Department to pursue his political enemies, Mr. Blanche has been eager to comply. The latest example is a frivolous case against Mr. Comey, who was indicted on a charge of threatening the president’s life because he posted an Instagram photo of a group of seashells in the shape of “86 47.” (The number 86 is slang meaning “nix,” and Mr. Trump is the 47th president. In an unrelated case barring the government’s attempt to remove a flag that said “86 47,” a federal judge wrote this month that “no reasonable observer could have viewed plaintiff’s display of the flag as a threat to the president’s life or physical safety.”) This is the second indictment of Mr. Comey that the administration has secured, the first coming in an unrelated case that a judge has already thrown out.
Mr. Blanche has also pursued sham investigations against John Brennan, the former C.I.A. director who looked into Russian interference in the 2016 Trump campaign, and Cassidy Hutchinson, a former Trump aide who implicated the president in the Jan. 6 violence.
Mr. Blanche has violated Justice Department ethics standards. Shortly after he became deputy attorney general last year, the department’s top ethics official told him he had to recuse himself from personal matters involving the president. Mr. Blanche, after all, had represented Mr. Trump in many of those same matters. Mr. Blanche agreed to the request, a former ethics official told CNN, and signed a pledge to recuse himself for at least a year from all cases involving his former clients, including Mr. Trump.
Mr. Blanche may also have benefited financially from actions he has taken. He owned $150,000 to $485,000 of crypto investments when he ordered an end to the investigations into the crypto industry that the Biden administration had begun, ProPublica reported last year. He also shut down a Justice Department enforcement team looking for fraud in the industry. Mr. Trump, of course, owns vast amounts of crypto investments.
Mr. Blanche has debased the Justice Department and helped undermine its post-Watergate commitment to independence. He has not only helped turn the department into an instrument of Mr. Trump’s will, but has said he sees nothing wrong in doing so. “That is his right,” Mr. Blanche said of the president’s investigative demands, “and indeed it is his duty to do that.”
This disregard for the department’s legacy of independence has damaged its reputation and effectiveness. The department has lost 21 percent of its lawyers since early 2025, from firings, buyouts and resignations. The most talented law-school graduates don’t want to work there anymore, the American Bar Association reported. To fill prosecutor jobs, the department has waived the requirement that new hires have some experience practicing law.
A useful standard for judging Mr. Blanche’s nomination recently came from Mr. Cornyn, another Republican on the Judiciary Committee and now a lame duck, after losing a Texas primary to Mr. Trump’s preferred candidate. Mr. Cornyn said he wanted to be confident that Mr. Blanche appreciated his potential role as the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. “I want to make sure he understands that,” the senator said, “because the attorney general is not the president’s private lawyer.”
No matter what claims Mr. Blanche makes now, he has already demonstrated that he rejects that distinction. He views himself as the president’s loyal enforcer. Mr. Cornyn and his colleagues need to say no.
