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Floor Speech

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here today to join the chorus of opposition to Todd Blanche's nomination as Attorney General of the United States.

Things that Republicans have purported to care about are disastrous with this guy. Pam Bondi put the blame directly on Todd Blanche for the Department of Justice's foulup with the Epstein files.

That foulup was pretty deadly serious for the women who were victims, who had managed to keep that fact private until Todd Blanche and the DOJ fouled that up and put out their names, put out their addresses, put out their photographs, and in some cases put out photographs with very little clothing on--complete disruption of the lives of the victims of Epstein's depravity, complete incompetence from a document- production point of view.

And on the other side, this guy actually participated in the Epstein coverup. Remember that there was a witness who spoke to FBI agents about having been assaulted by Donald Trump when she was about 14 years old, physically assaulted and sexually assaulted.

She spoke to the FBI at least four times. Those four times were recorded in FBI 302s. A 302 is the FBI name for the witness statement that the agents write up after an interview.

So four times this woman has been interviewed about what had happened to her as a girl. Three of those 302s specifically mentioned Donald Trump. In the disclosure that Todd Blanche made under the Epstein files law, the only one of the four that got disclosed was the one that didn't mention Donald Trump.

That ought to be disqualifying right there. Luckily, some very sharp investigators realized through, like, gaps in Bates stamp numbers that documents were missing and that the three 302s had not been disclosed. And so Blanche was forced to cough those up.

But behind a 302 come the agent notes. And there are still 37 pages of documents relating to that that are still suppressed, that are still covered up, that look to be the agents' notes, which should have been disclosed. So the coverup continued with respect to allegations against Donald Trump. Where else did the coverup continue?

Well, the Treasury Department sent to the Department of Justice what are called suspicious activity reports. A suspicious activity report is what you get when international banking transactions look like something funny is afoot, look like there is, for instance, money laundering going on. In this case, it was money laundering and human- trafficking concerns that provoked the suspicious activity reports.

You don't have to be a genius investigator to look at a suspicious activity report and deduce it might have something to do with some suspicious activity. It is the title of the report, for Pete's sake.

Billions of dollars of transactions were behind those suspicious activity reports. How many were investigated by the Blanche Department of Justice? Zero. Turned a complete blind eye to that whole aspect of the Epstein files, even though the suspicious activity reports were right in front of them.

And then he goes running down to Tallahassee to interview Epstein's comrade-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell. Did he use that interview to develop any new information, to go after people who were culpable in the Epstein files? No.

He used that interview to extract exculpatory comments from her about Donald Trump. Oh, that he was a perfect gentleman. And the next thing you know, she is rewarded with a transfer to a Club Fed-type prison.

What is the excuse for that? Oh, she was at risk. We felt she was in danger. Well, look, I have been around law enforcement for a long time, and this is the first time I have ever seen a prisoner allegedly in danger be transferred to a less secure setting to solve the problem of danger. Right? You move the prisoner to a more secure setting, not a less secure setting. It makes no sense. So in the Epstein files, Todd Blanche's fingerprints are all over the screwup and the coverup. Then we move on to the slush fund and the Trump family tax fraud amnesty, which was cooked up in a deal surrounding a Federal court proceeding, which was such a mess that the judge in that Federal court proceeding has gone back to look at what the heck happened.

She was looking at whether something happened called fraud upon the court. You probably haven't heard of fraud upon the court. It is unusually rare. It is a thermonuclear ethics accusation. We have looked. In the history of the Department of Justice, fraud on the court has not even been alleged against any senior DOJ official--ever. Ever.

And here you have a court that opened a proceeding, an inquiry, into whether or not there was fraud on the court, and that is still pending.

There is still every reason to believe that Blanche may be found culpable for putting a fraud on the court together to cook up the slush fund tax amnesty scheme. That is pretty unheard of.

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon in this Blanche Department of Justice. There is a cascade of criticism from Federal courts about misconduct by this Department of Justice--misconduct that is unprecedented.

I will tell you that I was the U.S. attorney for the District of Rhode Island. If judges had used words like this about my attorneys' conduct in their courtrooms, there would have been consequences. At a minimum, there would have been staff meetings. There could have been referrals to the Office of Professional Responsibility. There could have been apologies required to the court. There could have been a reboot, internal office discipline of what is going on with this case. But when a judge says that the government's argument is disingenuous, when the judge says that the government's argument is a pretext for something else, when the judge says that the government has engaged in bad faith, each one of those is a four-alarm fire word.

In medicine, there are things that they call never events, things that should never happen in a hospital that you protect against, these are never event words coming from Federal judges. And yet they are commonplace in the corrupted Department of Justice run by Todd Blanche.

As to his complicity in the Epstein files coverup, I ask unanimous consent that a letter from Epstein survivors to Senators Tillis and Cornyn be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.

Will)

What benefit of norms is owed to someone who disdains norms? There are many sufficient reasons to oppose confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general. Presidents generally are owed some deference in selecting Cabinet members, but ``some'' implies limits, lest the Senate's advice-and-consent duty be drained of responsibility. And not all presidents are equally owed. Today's president is owed little, given his contempt for the unwritten rules of civility that can lubricate a congenial society's governance.

Eight days after the 2024 election, Donald Trump set the tone of his second term by announcing his beau ideal of an attorney general: Rep. Matt Gaetz. This insult lasted eight days, until Gaetz withdrew as nominee. He had resigned from the House earlier, reportedly to prevent release of the House Ethics Committee's report on his alleged drug use and sexual misconduct, which a woman said included sex with her twice when she was 17.

Trump settled for Pam Bondi as attorney general, with Blanche as her deputy. While Blanche was the Justice Department's second-in-command, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, a Justice appendage, sought criminal indictments of six congressional Democrats, all with military or intelligence backgrounds. They had made a video.

Made while Trump's administration was killing people on boats (in international waters) suspected of carrying drugs, the video said what the Uniform Code of Military Justice says: Do not obey illegal orders. A grand jury did something vanishingly rare in criminal cases. It refused to indict the six.

Blanche was acting attorney general when the Justice Department took seriously Seashellgate. His department secured a second indictment of former FBI director James B. Comey, this time for posting a photograph of shells arranged on a beach to read ``86 47''; ``86'' is slang for ``remove.'' Trump is the 47th-president. Blanche's DOJ pretended to regard Comey's infantile gesture as a prosecutable threat.

Republican senators now have demanded Blanche's assurances that the proposed $1.776 billion slush fund, for compensating persons Trump designates as victims of Biden administration persecution, is dead. But this grift was incubated in Blanche's DOJ.

Blanche, who serves at the pleasure of the president, signed a memo pledging that the IRS is ``Forever Barred'' from ``examinations'' of Trump, certain members of his family, the Trump Organization and ``related or affiliated individuals.'' This ``negotiated''--try not to snicker-- settlement between the president and the executive branch he heads exemplifies the administration's sludge of self- dealing.

Trump sicced Blanche's compliant Justice Department on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell, ostensibly about fictitious criminality in construction spending, actually to pressure Powell to resign. With Blanche as deputy, then acting, attorney general, the Justice Department (per the Economist) gave courts inaccurate information ``nearly 100 times in Mr Trump's first 14 months.'' popular articles

In April, Blanche became acting attorney general when Trump fired Bondi. ``Nobody has any idea why,'' said Blanche. Plausible reports said Trump considered Bondi insufficiently aggressive about prosecuting his enemies. Blanche has said, cloudily, that ``some'' Justice Department prosecutions ``involve men, women, and entities'' that Trump ``has had issues with. . . . That is his right, and indeed it is his duty to do that, meaning, to lead this country.''

Blanche said it is ``completely false'' that the president targets political enemies. Trump merely ``wants justice.'' Blanche said he was not ``celebrating'' Trump's pardons of almost all the approximately 1,500 Jan. 6 rioters when, to a gathering of Trump supporters, he praised the ``generous'' pardons as one of the administration's accomplishments.

If at most four Republican senators had, in committee or floor votes, behaved as independently as the Founders thought senators would, Bondi, Kristi Noem, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and others would not have been confirmed to offices far above their competences. Children probably have died of measles, and of hepatitis B passed from mothers to infants, because of vaccine hesitancy promoted by Kennedy, who lied when he promised not to indulge in such quackery if confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services.

Now comes Blanche. He received this embarrassingly backhanded endorsement (in the Wall Street Journal) from former attorney general William Barr: Blanche ``will run the department as effectively as anyone could under President Trump.'' Is this sufficient reassurance for Republican senators? Or will, at last, a nominee trigger their gag reflexes?

Once, when someone noted that Sen. Richard Russell, the Georgia Democrat, had ``served under'' six presidents, Russell bristled, saying he ``served with'' six. It will be a pleasant surprise if, concerning Blanche, a few Republican senators become similarly sensitive about those prepositions.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And with respect to this litany of criticism of the honesty of the Blanche Department of Justice, I would like to add a ProPublica article entitled ``Federal Judges Chastise Trump's Justice Department for `Unlawful,' `Unethical' and `Unseemly' Conduct,'' whose first sentence begins:

Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.

David McSwane, Pratheek Rebala, and Carla Astudillo)

Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.

From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what's called ``the presumption of regularity.'' It essentially means that judges must presume that the government--whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent--did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith.

Until Trump's second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump's DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called ``unlawful,'' ``unethical,'' ``unseemly'' or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned.

ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word.

``Judges simply don't believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,'' said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush.

``I don't think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we've ever seen anything close to this.''

In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors' conduct--saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts--as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital's care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn't communicated with the department.

``The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ's tactics in this case is unsettling,'' McElroy wrote. ``The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that `[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word--with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes--no longer holds.' ''

Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trump's political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president's political enemies.

In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department.

Federal judges rarely grant interviews, and none of the judges who criticized the Justice Department in their orders granted interviews to ProPublica.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the DOJ said its attorneys are ``dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law.''

``The Department stands firmly behind the professionalism and good faith of its attorneys,'' said spokesperson Kiersten Pels. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Federal judges have found that the government filed statements generated by artificial intelligence that referenced nonexistent case law, wrote briefs that ignored facts and filed declarations with inaccurate dates, the ProPublica review shows.

In one case, the government included documentation claiming a detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009. That detainee, the judge noted, citing what she called the government's persistent ``sloppiness,'' would have been 4 years old.

``This Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [the U.S. government] unless they are made under oath by an individual with personal knowledge,'' Judge Christine O'Hearn, a President Joe Biden appointee, wrote in New Jersey while reviewing a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by a man who claimed he was unlawfully imprisoned by immigration officers. O'Hearn accused the government of defying her orders when, instead of releasing the man, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred him to a different facility in New York.

In Minnesota, the state's top political leaders had publicly clashed with the administration following the violent ICE raids that led to the deaths of two U.S. citizens. Then the administration filed a flurry of subpoenas against them.

Last month, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, who was appointed by George W. Bush and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, slammed the government's actions and ``spurious claims,'' saying the presumption of regularity was being abused.

``Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action--particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take--is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use [of] the grand-jury process,'' the judge wrote. ``Breakdown'' of a Presumption

The presumption of regularity creates a high bar for those suing the government or defending themselves against it in criminal cases. They often must provide evidence that the government willfully violated a policy or otherwise deviated from its charge--that is, did something irregular--to overcome the standard.

It's a shield the government wields often, with little notice, and one that is almost always successful. But overcoming that presumption has become increasingly common under Trump's second term, according to court watchers.

About half of the cases ProPublica identified as questioning the presumption come from districts, including D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where by proximity and jurisdiction many of Trump's actions are challenged and often heard by Democratic-nominated judges. The Southern District of New York, which has issued repeated rebukes of Trump administration actions, and the Northern District of California, another Democratic stronghold, are other hotbeds of judicial scrutiny.

Last September, D.C. District Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui accused the administration of working around the federal grand jury process, getting an indictment from a state court after prosecutors had failed to get one in his court, which he called ``unseemly,'' if not ``unlawful.'' He fired off one of the earliest signs that the presumption itself could come into question.

``This only deepens the growing mistrust of the actions of prosecutors,'' the judge wrote. ``That is a sentiment that was once unthinkable, but the irregular is now the regular.'' While the case was largely managed by assistant U.S. attorney Caelainn Carney, according to court transcripts, Faruqui was aiming his frustration at her bosses, including senior prosecutor Jonathan R. Hornok, and the leadership at DOJ. Neither attorney responded to requests for comment.

Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told ProPublica that Faruqui ``was wrong on the law'' and noted that after the government appealed to the district's chief judge, his order was overruled. ``Judge Faruqui has a long-standing documented pattern of editorializing from the bench beyond the scope of the cases before him,'' Pels added.

But in recent months, skepticism about the presumption has also come from judges appointed by Republicans, such as McElroy, or in GOP strongholds.

In Indiana, Trump-appointed federal Judge James Patrick Hanlon ordered the release of Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a lawful U.S. resident, from ICE custody in March. Sarsour's lawyers argued the government had targeted him to suppress his First Amendment right to free speech. The DOJ invoked the presumption of regularity and argued his arrest was part of an anti-terrorism dragnet, which the judge threw out.

In the Southern District of Ohio, Judge Michael R. Barrett, appointed by George W. Bush, ordered ICE to release a detainee after concluding the presumption had been overcome because the government hadn't presented a reasonable argument that the man was a flight risk.

News outlets, including CNN, have documented federal judges' ire with Trump's DOJ, and some of the cases under question have been well-publicized, such as the government's illegal deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. In that case, Judge Paula Xinis, a President Barack Obama appointee, criticized the government, saying, ``You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you've destroyed it.''

Many of the rulings challenged one of Trump's hallmark efforts: immigration enforcement and deportations.

``The presumption of regularity and integrity previously and routinely afforded to the Executive branch and the United States Attorney's Office has been undeniably eroded in this jurisdiction and across the country,'' O'Hearn wrote in February, noting that the federal government had repeatedly violated court orders in her district and others related to immigration operations.

In another immigration detention case, this one in Washington state, Biden-appointed Judge Lauren King sail, ``[t]he `presumption of regularity' is dislodged here by the numerous factual errors in Respondents' filings and by their conflicting representations.''

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge from California, said what's happening in the courts feels more like a ``political conflict'' than the normal ebb and flow of the justice system.

``It's really one branch that is really sort of questioning the legitimacy of the other one,'' Fogel said. ``I think the judges are trying to stand up for the legitimacy of their branch''

Just Security, an online law and policy journal, has been tracking cases in which federal judges have admonished Trump's prosecutors, including those involving the presumption.

``We're witnessing a breakdown in the ways in which any administration ordinarily carries out its responsibilities, through the Justice Department in particular,'' said Ryan Goodman, Just Security's co-editor-in-chief. Erosion of Trust, Ethics Inquiries

The erosion of trust from the federal bench comes as Trump has profoundly shifted priorities at the DOJ to align with his political platform: ending civil rights and diversity programs, deporting immigrants and stripping away environmental protections.

Those who deal with DOJ lawyers have noticed the difference in court.

Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, has faced off on environmental issues with the DOJ many times. Although they may disagree, he said, he always expected his opponents to be ``fair and above board.''

That dynamic is gone, he said.

``I would call it a transformation of the role of the Justice Department,'' he said. ``There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that's an extraordinary thing.''

The result, Bernard said, is that ``the government will lose more cases as a result of the way the Justice Department is behaving.''

Meanwhile, groups such as his are benefitting from the government brain drain. ``We hired 10 litigating attorneys last year,'' he said. Of those, eight came from the DOJ.

Judges aren't just losing faith in the DOJ. Some are pushing to sanction Justice Department lawyers.

This month, Miami federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams ruled that Trump's lawsuit against the IRS was an improper exercise in self-enrichment, citing the president's lawyers for a series of misstatements in the case.

The Obama appointee referred the lawyer who brought the president's case against the IRS, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. She also forwarded her ruling to disciplinary officials in New York, who had earlier received an ethics complaint about acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

A DOJ spokesperson called the Blanche case ``nothing more than a politically motivated bar complaint, filed by partisan activists who disagree with this Administration's policies.'' Brito did not respond to a request for comment.

In Rhode Island, McElroy referred DOJ lawyers to a review board for possible discipline for their handling of the hospital investigation.

``As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary,'' McElroy wrote. ``DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.''

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. And then this isn't just a problem in American legal communities. There is a global magazine called The Economist magazine, which, by the way, does not run liberal. It is a fairly conservative publication.

The cover story in the July 18 The Economist is a picture of the Department of Justice logo and the title ``Degradation in progress.''

I ask that The Economist magazine article--there are actually two. One is the opening article that they lead with before they get to the main article; and the second is the main article--the two articles about the degradation of the Department of Justice under Todd Blanche be added to the Record as well.

Markets were shocked to see President Donald Trump set the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Jerome Powell when he was still the chairman of the Federal Reserve. Champions of press freedom cried foul last week when the department issued subpoenas to New York Times journalists for explaining the truth about Qatar's gift of a jet to the president. But Mr. Trump's grievance agenda isn't the half of it.

In a sign of how much he treats the department as his own personal law firm, he wants his actual lawyer to become attorney-general. Senate hearings begin this week for Todd Blanche, who is currently the acting attorney-general. Those on Mr. Trump's enemies list are not the only ones who should be worried. The president is also inflicting less-noticed harms on the DOJ that are as bad as the attention-grabbing ones. The damage is likely to be profound.

The DOJ is the government's lawyer, but it also serves as the guardian of the law, especially since Watergate. In 2019 Bill Barr, then Mr. Trump's pick for attorney-general, said that Americans ``have to know that there are places in the government where the rule of law--not politics--holds sway'' and that the Department of Justice ``must be such a place''. Mr. Trump has no time for that. Less than halfway through his second term, he has turned the DOJ from an arm of the law into a muscular limb of the presidency (see United States section).

For a start, he has dramatically redefined the department's priorities, which is legitimate, often by setting goals that blur policy and politics, which is not. Health-care fraud is being chased with particular zeal in states run by Democrats, such as California and Minnesota, where it can be used to discredit Mr. Trump's opponents, including the states' governors, Gavin Newson and Tim Walz.

The DOJ is also an effective tool for pursing his political agenda. Election fraud is consuming ever more of its resources--not because it is a real problem, but because it is a presidential obsession. The DOJ has sued states for access to their voter rolls. In January the FBI seized hundreds of boxes filled with ballots and other documents in Georgia's most populous county, part of an investigation of the presidential election in 2020. More recently, some 260 FBI analysts were dispatched to pore over Georgia's files, with a deadline to review records by July 17th. At the very least, this will shake voters' faith that elections are trustworthy--indeed, that may be its sinister design.

Matters of genuine public interest are left to languish. About a quarter of the DOJ's lawyers have left. Divisions that investigated cryptocurrency fraud and public corruption have withered. Financial-fraud indictments by prosecutors at DOJ headquarters and in Manhattan are down by 30% from the ten-year average. About 300 special agents who specialise in national security have quit the FBI, taking decades of experience in counterterrorism and cyber-warfare with them.

The department has also become more chaotic. Too often, cases encounter problems in court, though it is hard to distinguish sloppiness by DOJ staff from deliberate ill- intent. Nearly 100 times in Mr. Trump's first 14 months, the DOJ supplied courts with inaccurate information. It is quite something for the State to lose the benefit of the doubt in its own courtrooms.

More than 61,000 petitions from detained immigrants have bogged down courts and frustrated judges and federal prosecutors, who have moved lawyers from criminal divisions to help. By September last year, about a fifth of FBI agents had been diverted to immigration enforcement.

Meanwhile, the president's powers are increasing. In Trump v Slaughter last month the Supreme Court ruled that the president could sack leaders of semi-independent agencies, such as the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). That gives the president the capacity to force agencies to work in league with the DOJ. Imagine a co-ordinated campaign of pressure, in which the DOJ opens an antitrust inquiry, the FTC explores consumer fraud and the SEC investigates corporate disclosures.

Unfortunately, the permanent appointment of Mr. Blanche is unlikely to mark an improvement. He has done as much as anyone to advance Mr. Trump's agenda of prosecuting his enemies and protecting his friends--a powerful combination for encouraging people to comply with Mr. Trump's wishes. Under Mr. Blanche, the DOJ has recently threatened state election officials with criminal prosecution if they knowingly let non-citizens remain on voting rolls.

Democrats and more than 1,200 former DOJ lawyers have demanded that the Senate reject Mr. Blanche's nomination. The Senate now has the choice of confirming him, and thereby seeming to endorse Mr. Trump's broader agenda, or blocking him in a rare rebuke to the president. Unfortunately, a rejection may not accomplish all that much. Mr. Trump can retain Mr. Blanche as acting attorney-general for months or nominate someone just as pliable.

The best Americans can hope for, in the next two years, is that courts stand firm. So far they have generally checked the DOJ's worst impulses. On July 7th a federal judge blocked the department's effort to subpoena the names of election of workers in Georgia. On July 13th another federal judge nullified a settlement organised by the DOJ in response to a civil case brought by Mr. Trump that would have protected the president and his family from tax audits. In the dock

Even if Americans elect a president who wants to restore the DOJ, the damage will be hard to reverse. Mr. Trump's acolytes would see the ejection of his partisan lawyers as a witch hunt that justifies the next purge when they take back power. Once the arrival of any new administration routinely entails a fresh round of sackings, professionals who care about the rule of law will think twice about signing up. After Watergate, statesmanship and a bipartisan effort were needed to create the modern DOJ. Today the stakes are as high, and the task is harder. ____ The Rule of One

Anyone who has ever worked as a lawyer for Donald Trump makes a bet. There is the possibility that you, too, will run afoul of the law--eight of the president's lawyers have themselves been indicted. Alternatively, your work might pay dividens. Such was Todd Blanche's calculus three years ago when his white-shoe firm gave him a choice: represent Mr. Trump, then a candidate and a criminal defendant, or remain a partner. Mr. Blanche chose Mr. Trump. Now the president has selected him to be America's top cop.

On July 15th the Senate began hearings to consider Mr. Blanche's nomination to lead the Department of Justice (DOJ). Whether lawmakers confirm him as attorney-general will test their willingness to endorse Mr. Trump's legal agenda, but even a rebuke would be only symbolic. The president will still get his way at the DOJ; Mr. Blanche can stay in the job on an acting basis for months and be replaced by someone similar after.

With or without Mr. Blanche, the president will continue to lead a transformation of dramatic scale. With warrants and subpoenas, the DOJ is pursuing Mr. Trump's critics and his hobby-horses, from political adversaries to election fraud to leaks in the press. The number of lawyers has dwindled by 20%; former prosecutors point to an incompatibility between the president's agenda and the fair application of law. The DOJ is retreating from certain types of criminal enforcement. And, increasingly, judges are telling government lawyers that they cannot be taken at their word.

The DOJ's duties, at least as historically defined, include enforcing the law and defending the government in court. Ever since Richard Nixon urged his attorney-general to intefere with an investigation, politicians of both parties have generally agreed that the DOJ should operate at some distance from the presidency. Mr. Trump has bucked that consensus, claiming that Democrats weaponized the law against him. Joe Biden's DOJ indicted him twice, elected Democratic district- attorneys indicted him twice more and Letitia James, New York's attorney-general, sued him in civil court.

Pam Bondi, Mr. Trump's first attorney-general, was fired in April for being insufficiently aggressive. Mr. Blanche told the Senate this week that he is not the president's ``yes man''. But shortly after assuming his current post, Mr. Blanche was touting a second indictment against James Comey, a former FBI director and antagonist of the president. Mr. Comey had posted a photo of seashells on a beach arranged like ``86 47''. To ``86'' someone means to get rid of them; Mr. Trump is the 47th president. The DOJ contends that Mr. Comey was threatening to kill Mr. Trump.

This prosecution is almost certain to fall, just like the president's cases against Mr. James; Jerome Powell, the former chair of the Federal Reserve; and six Democratic lawmakers. Last month a court tossed subpoenas targeting Tim Walz, Minnesota's govenor, and other Democratic officials in that state. The judge wrote that the subpoenas were ``not issued to investigate, but to harass, coerce and retaliate'' for the officials' refusal to aid the president's immigration crackdown.

Mr. Trump complements prosecutions of political foes with lenient treatment of his friends, through pardons and dropped charges. Last year political appointees at the DOJ ordered prosecutors to abandon a corruption case against Eric Adams, then New York's mayor. Unlike Mr. Walz, he had agreed to co- operate on immigration. A judge in New York wants to know whether a quid pro quo inspired the DOJ to drop fraud charges against Gautam Adani, an Indian billionaire who has promised to invest $10bn in America.

Mr. Trump had sought to reward allies most explicitly through a $1.8bn fund for supposed victim of government lawfare. Even Republican senators balked at that; in June Mr. Blanche said he had given up the idea. But it loomed over his confirmation hearing, with John Cornyn, a Republican senator, observing that his answers ``don't lead inevitably to the conclusion that it's a dead''.

The DOJ is vast; last year it charged 81,000 people. Politicized probes mark a radical departure from past norms, but they are not enough to upend that work. Yet broader change is underway, too, with the department itself depleted and redirected, at remarkable speed.

Mass attrition means that some of the most experienced lawyers have left, often for better pay in the private sector, A former prosecutor in the Virginia office hat first indicted Mr. Comey recounts how, after charges were issued, nearly everyone in his unit started looking for new work. ``These people have job options.'' Now the DOJ is struggling to fill its ranks, lowering hiring standards to rake applicants straight from law school and offering some recruits $25,000 signing bonuses.

Units specialising in cryptocurrency fraud and corruption by public officials have been gutted. (As it happens, Mr. Trump made more than $1.4bn from cryptocurrency last year.) The group focused on counterintelligence and enforcing export controls has warned Congress of ``unprecedented personnel constraints'', with a 40% drop in prosecutors from a year and a half ago. Up to a third of the counterterrorism section has left, says a former prosecutor in that unit. The FBI, which sits within the DOJ, has lost about 300 special agents who worked on national security.

The DOJ's national-security division has expertise that most prosecutors lack, in handling classified information and charging complex statutes. They sift through dozens of FBI referrals and decide which to pursue. ``What feels real versus which ones are idle chatter? When is the right time to disrupt a plot? Do we go now? Prosecutors learn that only by working these cases over many years,'' says one who left last year.

Fewer resources mean less enforcement in some domains. White-collar defence lawyers remark how work has slowed. Last year the number of financial-fraud indictments out of DOJ headquarters and the U.S. attorney's office in Manhattan fell by 30% from the ten-year average. Indictments are a lagging indicator of enforcement activity. Subpoenas of financial firms, which precede them, are ``not happening, basically,'' says a white-collar lawyer in New York, who expects even fewer indictments to come. ``Nobody's investigating those things.'' Cases targeting political graft have largely dried up. Mr. Trump is notably lax about that, having granted clemency to at least 20 politicians convicted of self-dealing over his two terms.

Instead the DOJ has made a big show around the president's bugbears: healthcare and benefits fraud; anything connected to cartels; transgender care; diversity, equity and inclusion; and election fraud. Recently the FBI dispatched 260 analysts to investigate debunked claims of vote-rigging in the 2020 election in Georgia, which Mr. Trump maintains he won. In January the FBI seized records related to that race in Georgia's Fulton County. Last week a judge quashed the DOJ's subpoena seeking names of poll workers there: an ``overly broad fishing expedition is bad and is not allowed,'' he said.

The DOJ will be at the tip of the spear if Mr. Trump attempts to intervene in the midterm elections in November. Ominously, it has all but shut the unit that normally monitors election-related crimes. A prosecutor who left that section last year says he thinks the administration is ``taking steps to be in a position to put its thumb on the scale in 2026 or 2028''.

Election-year training for FBI agents and DOJ staff, once mandatory, has been cancelled. The department seems to have no intention to stand up the National Election Command Post, which normally monitors irregularities. Instead, election deniers populate the DOJ, including several who worked to overturn the 2020 result. Recently they threatened to prosecute election officials who let non-citizens vote.

No issue has consumed the attention of the Trump administration like immigration. By September the FBI had diverted a fifth of its roughly 14,000 agents to immigration enforcement. What is striking is not that the president has made immigration a priority--he said he would do as much--but the manner in which DOJ lawyers are pursing those cases.

In the autumn Mr. Blanche showed up in Chicago, the site of a surge of agents dubbed ``Operation Midway Blitz'', and decried ``an organised effort by domestic terrorists to actually injure and hurt'' those agents. Then his deputy told prosecutors to ``go big and go loud'' against protesters.

A prosecutor in Chicago who left earlier this year says that every unit there, including ones focused on cyber and national-security crime, was dragooned into protester cases, which became a ``dreaded thing''. He says the pressure from the front office to file charges was so great that prosecutors had to present a compelling argument not to do so. That is the inverse of how decisions are usually made.

Agents arrested nearly 4,000 immigrants during Midway Blitz. The crack-down in Chicago also became a stark example of how to drive away lawyers. In the U.S. attorney's office, which has seven criminal sections, each chief serving at the start of Midway Blitz has quit. Seven of their 15 deputies and at least a quarter of the 90 or so staff prosecutors have left, too.

Across the country, there have been hundreds of shaky cases brought against protesters. Many collapse before trial. A jury rebellion awaits those that do make it that far. Ten of 13 resulted in an acquittal as of March, according to Steven Salky, a defence lawyer who tracks unusual charging decisions. By contrast, across all federal trials last year, the acquittal rate was 12%.

Some cases have veered into the absurd. A jury took 35 minutes to acquit a man accused of pointing a laser at the president's helicopter. Once unusual practices are more common. In October prosecutors charged six Democratic activists and politicians in Chicago with conspiring to impede a federal agent, in a case known as the ``Broadview Six''. After a judge reviewed transcripts from the grand-jury sitting--held in secret, without judges or defence lawyers-- she said she had never seen such misbehaviour by prosecutors. Among other no-nos, they had dismissed sceptical jurors (including one who called the case ``a crock of shit'') who might have been unlikely to return an indictment. In May prosecutors dropped the case.

A consequence of all this is that the DOJ is losing credibility in the courts. Increasingly judges are calling out lapses by government lawyers, saying they cannot take them at face value. The judge overseeing the Broadview Six case said she believed that ``most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing''. Then she added: ``That trust has been broken.'' More judges are now requiring depositions and documents to verify that the government's claims are true, and threatening sanctions when its lawyers obfuscate or fail to comply. In the first 14 months of Mr. Trump's second term, according to Just Security, a site for legal commentary, the DOJ gave courts inaccurate information in nearly 100 instances.

The problem is acute in immigration cases. The administration's mass-detention policy led to a twentyfold spike in ``habeas'' petitions by detained immigrants suing for release between 2024 and 2025. Just Security found nearly 800 instances of non-compliance with court orders in habeas cases, and 13 sanctions and contempt-of-court findings against DOJ lawyers. The administration's response has been to label any judge who disagrees with it a ``rogue activist''. Mr. Blanche has called it a ``war'' on the judiciary.

Seen one way, that fighting talk reflects something positive: the guardrails in the judicial system holding up, to the administration's dismay. Already the department's alumni are asking what it will take to reconstitute it when Mr. Trump leaves office. A former prosecutor says he and his former colleagues want to return. Still, the appeal of the department diminishes somewhat with the prospect that the next person overseeing it may sack you, or harness the law for their personal ends. For decades the DOJ enjoyed some protection from the politics that have fractured America. That era seems over.

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Last, there is a group called Just Security, which keeps track of what goes on in Federal courts. This is a binder of the cases that they have put together in which a Federal judge is harshly criticizing the integrity or the competence of the Department of Justice.

This binder, frankly, should not exist. This is two-sided, by the way. These many cases--it is just astounding. I am not going to ask that this all be put into the Record. But I will note that if you look at justsecurity.org, you can look at their report published on March 19, 2026. It gets regularly updated.

And if you want to go through it, you can see truly appalling criticisms by Federal judges of every appointment background against incompetence and dishonesty by the Blanche Department of Justice.

Where that really hits the road is with something called the presumption of regularity. You might not know what the presumption of regularity is, but it is a benefit that the government enjoys--that as a matter of policy, the Federal judiciary has determined that the Federal Government is generally so honest and competent that its proceedings will be given the presumption of regularity that the benefit of the doubt will go to the Department of Justice lawyers and to the government Agencies involved.

Unless the adversary can prove otherwise, courts will presume that the government has done the right thing. And over and over again, we have seen judges say that presumption of regularity is now shot because there is so much dishonesty and incompetence coming out of the Department of Justice. That is unprecedented.

There are hundreds of other reasons to vote against this most reprehensible Attorney General nominee in American history, but the very specific ones about his complicity in the Epstein files screwup and coverup, his being the first senior Department of Justice official in the history of the United States to face a fraud on the courts inquiry, where the judge already decided that the proceeding was a sham and that the parties were in collusion with each other and that the whole thing was done in bad faith, and that that is not an isolated incident--that is part of a pattern of incompetence and dishonesty out of the Department of Justice that has never before happened in the United States of America.

If my Republican colleagues want to get behind that--if they are cool with an Attorney General who has that record--that is on you.

We understand that both of you remain open to opposing his nomination, and we are asking you to stand with survivors of human trafficking and sexual assault at this critical moment.

Under Todd Blanche's leadership, the Justice Department released survivors' names, identifying information and images while the names of alleged abusers and enablers remained hidden. More than a thousand women and girls were abused, yet no one beyond Epstein and Maxwell has been prosecuted.

During Todd Blanche's meeting with survivors, survivors asked direct questions about how these redaction failures happened and whether he would purse the investigative leads that remain. Survivors received an hour of deflection, interruption and gaslighting. Todd Blanche showed no remorse for the horrific release of materials that exposed survivors' identities and images. He also gave no indication that he believed there were investigative leads worth pursing, or that he intended to seek accountability beyond Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.

Senator Tillis, when you urged Todd Blanche to meet with survivors, we believed you expected a serious and meaningful conversation. What occurred was a box-checking exercise arranged only after his confirmation was put at risk. Blanche's willingness to sit in a room with us should not matter more than how he treated us once he was there.

Both of you have records of standing with survivors of human trafficking and sexual assault. A vote to confirm Todd Blanche would be a vote against those survivors. It would reward someone who has refused to take responsibility for the harm they've caused, failed to provide meaningful answers and shown no credible commitment to pursing the full truth.

We urge you to vote no on Todd Blanche's confirmation. Sincerely,

Annie Farmer, Jane Doe, Jena-Lisa Jones, Lara Blume McGee, Michelle Licata, Ashley Rubright, Jane Doe, Jennifer, Lisa Phillips, Rachel Benavidez, Audra Lynn, Jane Doe, Jess Michaels, Liz Stein, Roza, Dani Bensky, Jane Doe, Joanna Harrison, Marijke Chartouni, Sharlene Rochard, Jane Doe, Jane Doe, Juliette Bryant, Marina Lacerda, Teresa J. Helm, Wendy Pesante.
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