At Least 3 Republicans Look Ready to Sink Blanche’s A.G. Dreams

It appears that a handful of Senate Republicans are prepared to kill Todd Blanche’s dreams of becoming attorney general.

Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tillis are already giving noncommittal answers on whether they’d support acting Attorney General Blanche’s nomination to permanently lead the Justice Department.

“Being attorney general is probably one of the hardest jobs in the Cabinet, because you’re working for the president, but you’re also supposed to be able to tell the president ‘no,’” Cornyn told CNN’s Manu Raju while discussing his hesitancy on Blanche. “So we need to talk about that.”

Tiillis, who sits on the critical Senate Judiciary Committee, referred to Blanche’s support for January 6 insurrectionists as a “circuit-breaker.”

“He’s got good credentials—people are going to hammer him because he was the president’s personal attorney, but I’m just more about getting through the J6 stuff,” he told The Washington Examiner. “It’s not a gray area for me. Either he equivocated and said harming these Capitol police officers was an OK thing, or he didn’t, and we’ll find that in the due diligence.”

Senator Mitch McConnell looks to be another likely “no” vote, as he recently lambasted Blanche for his support for President Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” slush fund, calling the move “utterly stupid” and “morally wrong.”

Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune told Punchbowl News that it’s “hard to say” if Blanche will be confirmed.

“Most of our members are pretty deferential to who the president wants in some of these key positions,” he said. “He’s obviously serving in the role already and clearly has experience in it, so that’ll serve him well. But this is an environment where nothing’s a safe or sure bet these days.”

Only four GOP “no” votes are needed to sink Blanche’s nomination—assuming Vice President J.D. Vance doesn’t cast a tie-breaking vote and embattled Democrat John Fetterman votes with his party.

A Republican congresswoman is trying to claim she was assaulted when an activist brushed her arm. 

On Wednesday, Representative Anna Paulina Luna complained on X, “The head honcho of CodePink here on Capitol Hill decided to try to harass me as I was leaving my hearing with Rubio and smacked my arm.

“I have no issues answering questions but the moment you touch me you cross a line,” Luna posted. She said she gave a statement to Capitol Police and would be filing charges. 

But TMZ posted video of the incident, and it shows Medea Benjamin, the head of CodePink, walking alongside Luna outside of the House Rayburn Office Building and only lightly brushing her arm, to which Luna reacted angrily. 

In a series of posts on X, Luna attacked the organization for being funded by the Chinese Communist Party and for crossing “a personal boundary that should NEVER be crossed.” In the comments, multiple X users, including Benjamin, mocked Luna for dramatizing the incident. 

CodePink posted that Benjamin had been detained by Capitol Police but later released, and called out the Trump administration’s wars against Cuba and the Middle East.  

Former national security adviser John Bolton is expected to agree to a plea deal over mishandling classified documents, in a major win for Donald Trump’s retribution campaign.

Bolton is expected to plead guilty to one count of illegal retention of sensitive national security documents and has agreed to pay a more than $2 million fine, according to sources that spoke with CNN Thursday.

A conviction could put the 77-year-old in the clink: One count of illegal retention carries a sentence between zero and 60 months in prison.

Bolton’s loss is a major coup for Trump, who has leveraged the power of his second term to enact a widespread retribution campaign against his so-called political enemies.

Bolton was one of the president’s closest advisers during his first term—until September 2019, when Trump fired him over internal clashes related to foreign policy. He has since become one of Trump’s most vocal critics from his last administration, railing against the president’s takes on NATO, Iran, and Russia.

Trump began advocating for Bolton’s arrest around the time that the former adviser published his 2020 memoir, The Room Where It Happened, about his time in the Trump White House. The book was very critical of the president, but Trump took it a step further, claiming that the text was actually illegal as Bolton had included classified information. Trump’s DOJ opened criminal and civil investigations into Bolton at the time, though the cases were closed mere months into the Biden administration.

Prosecutors in the new case have accused Bolton of sharing “more than a thousand pages of information about his day-to-day activities” via his personal email with his wife and daughter, CNN reported late last year. Yet the transmission of information is not part of the charges Bolton is expected to plead guilty to.

Bolton’s hearing is scheduled for June 26.

This story has been updated.

Federal prosecutors at the Justice Department are stepping on their own toes trying to fix their indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche gleefully announced the indictment against the SPLC in April, claiming at the time that the famed anti-racism group was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

The DOJ cited undercover investigations the SPLC had conducted in conjunction with law enforcement as evidence that the Montgomery-based nonprofit was funneling millions of dollars into groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Socialist Party of America.

The organization was charged with 11 counts related to its undercover activities. They include six counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to conceal money laundering, and charges related to allegedly falsified bank statements. The SPLC has denied the allegations and pleaded not guilty.

But there were considerable problems with the original indictment, which legal experts posited could make it difficult to win in court.

This week, the DOJ’s director of public affairs Emily Covington shared a superseding indictment with the media that was supposed to have fixed the errors. Instead, Covington made a grave error herself by publishing a draft version of the document and, in turn, potentially violating grand jury secrecy rules, national security journalist Marcy Wheeler wrote on her EmptyWheel blog.

The superseding indictment also warps the rationale behind the charges, arguing that they do not stem from the general practice of paying informants but rather that the SPLC had violated the law by failing to notify its donors of the operational mechanics of its informant network. But, as former U.S. Attorney Joyce Vance argued, the SPLC didn’t need to.

“DOJ may find itself with egg on its face when it comes to donors’ views of how SPLC used their money,” Vance wrote Thursday in her own assessment of the new document. “They weren’t obligated to publish a roadmap explaining exactly how they infiltrate dangerous organizations. Journalists do not disclose confidential sources. Civil rights groups tracking violent extremists aren’t obligated to expose their work, which would compromise it.

“This isn’t a case like the ‘We Build The Wall’ fraud Steve Bannon and others were charged in, after they promised not to take donor money for personal use and then did,” Vance noted.

The SPLC was founded in 1971 in order to combat white supremacist groups after the Civil Rights Movement. Its activity was never a secret to the government—in fact, the SPLC frequently coordinated with local and federal law enforcement, sharing its findings in order to dismantle hateful institutions.

Yet in the decades since its founding, the nonprofit’s purview has been nationally perceived (at least on the right) as less and less acceptable. Conservative politicians and personalities have railed against the advocacy group, claiming that its work—which includes tracking extremist groups, promoting tolerance, and kneecapping bigotry through litigation—is inherently partisan and overly leftist.

The Pentagon’s newly hired counterterrorism official was seen on camera participating in the January 6, 2021, insurrection. 

Video analyzed by The Washington Post shows Elias Irizarry, who was 19 in 2021, crawling into the Capitol through a broken window, posing for photos in a private conference room, climbing onto a statue of former President Ronald Reagan, and leaving after 20 minutes.

 He was charged with misdemeanor trespassing before being pardoned by President Trump.  

The Post identified Irizarry in at least five videos of the insurrection.

“I am ashamed because I will always be a part of this disgrace,” Irizarry said during his 2023 sentencing. “January 6 represented something truly horrible; it was the largest attack on our democracy since the Civil War.”

Now he’ll serve in a sensitive position at the Pentagon’s Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict office, which oversees embassy security, personnel recovery, and hostage rescue, among other things.  

Irizarry isn’t the first insurrectionist to be rewarded with a job in the Trump administration. Former FBI agent and insurrectionist Jared L. Wise—who shouted “Kill ’em! Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” while the mob attacked law enforcement at the Capitol—is now part of Trump’s Department of Justice.