Blanche’s Nomination in Limbo After Canceled Meeting With GOP Holdouts

Todd Blanche’s chance at becoming attorney general is in genuine jeopardy after  Republican Senator John Cornyn canceled a meeting with the nominee amid an ongoing standoff over President Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Cornyn was approached by CNN’s Manu Raju in the Senate halls on Wednesday after news that his morning meeting with Blanche had been canceled.

“So, are you a ‘no’? Are you a ‘no’ tomorrow if this comes to a vote?” Raju asked. 

“Well, [Senate Judiciary Committee Chair] Grassley tells me that we need to know by four o’clock this afternoon whether the markup is still on. So we’ve still got a little time,” Cornyn responded. “And hopefully they now recognize the seriousness of this, and will be responding.” 

“But if it stands as it is now … right now, would you vote ‘no’?”

“I’m not prepared to vote ‘yes,’ lemme put it that way,” Cornyn said. 

Cornyn, along with Senator Thom Tillis, has been demanding written termination of Trump’s $1.776 slush fund to help his allies. Tillis told Semafor on Wednesday that there’s “no daylight” between himself and Cornyn on the anti-weaponization fund’s termination. 

Even one Republican “no” vote would effectively kill Blanche’s nomination, as he needs the support of all 11 Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to move forward, assuming every Democrat votes ‘no.’ All Blanche has to do is deliver a written statement assuring them that Trump’s fund is dead—and yet he’s refusing. 

“We’ve still got what, about another five or six hours?  That’s plenty of time to resolve this,” Cornyn continued. “There’s no real need to have a meeting if they will just produce the documentation that we’ve requested—and that he testified to under oath during his hearing.”

“Sir, you’ve been incredibly clear with what you would like Todd Blanche to do … for days now,” another reporter asked. “What do you think the holdup is here?”

“Beats me. Maybe they think I’m just going to give up or, you know, go along, but they’re mistaken.” 

Donald Trump may have personally undone the criminal case against one of his political nemeses, former FBI Director James Comey, thanks to his deep involvement.

The Department of Justice accused Comey of threatening the president’s life when he posted a photo of seashells to his Instagram account last year, arguing that the message the shells spelled out—“86 47”—would be interpreted by any person “familiar with the circumstances” as a “serious expression of an intent to do harm to the president,” according to Comey’s indictment.

But on Tuesday, Comey’s lawyers argued that the entire case should be moot due to Trump’s personal involvement in Comey’s questioning, according to a motion to dismiss first reported on by The New York Times. According to government documents handed over to Comey’s team, Trump told Secret Service agents who interviewed the former FBI director to send their notes to Air Force One for Trump’s personal review.

The Secret Service questioned Comey by phone hours after he shared the protest message on Instagram on May 15. Despite being informed by a Secret Service agent that the telephone interview would likely suffice, Comey agreed to further questioning in Washington. “From that point forward, high-level DOJ and White House officials (including the President) involved themselves in the investigation,” stated Comey’s attorneys.

The Secret Service chose to monitor Comey the next day on his drive to Washington despite lacking a warrant—a decision that was noted by at least one agent as, legally, a “bad idea” since there was no “imminent danger to life” that could justify the warrantless surveillance.

They did so at the behest of the “number three” person at the DOJ, according to the legal document. That individual is not named in the memo, but the number three person at the DOJ is the associate attorney general, a position that was not filled by a Senate-confirmed official at the time of Comey’s surveillance. The agents tailed Comey and his wife even as they visited the grave of their deceased son, according to the filing.

A government document obtained by Comey’s team revealed that “POTUS was requesting a copy of the interview notes to use in his 6 p.m. press conference.” One Secret Service agent described the interview as “a hot topic on the plane,” noting that Trump was “very interested,” according to the Times.

Trump has been very public about his contempt for Comey since the FBI director led the investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia following the 2016 presidential election. Trump fired Comey in the midst of that probe, prompting a follow-up investigation by Comey’s predecessor, special counsel Robert Mueller, that determined that Russian influence in the 2016 election was “sweeping and systemic” and found substantial (if non-prosecutable) evidence that Trump had obstructed justice by firing Comey.

In another section of the legal filing, Comey’s attorneys revealed that the Trump administration attempted to prove the lethality behind Comey’s “86” post by questioning Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, a notorious gangster who was at one point the underboss in the Gambino crime family and was personally responsible for at least 19 murders. Gravano apparently confirmed the term’s violent definition, though he noted that a “gangster would never use that term” because it was too obvious to law enforcement.

In the hours following Comey’s post, the Secret Service instituted a new policy that redefined “86 47” as a formal threat to the president’s life. However, the agency rolled back the change by the day’s end and returned to “business as usual” as the policy shift resulted in an overwhelming number of potential leads that lacked “threatening language,” according to the filing.

Comey has denied the accusations, claiming that he was only familiar with the term via restaurant slang, where it contextually means to remove an item off the menu.

While Republican leadership attempts to pin millions of Covid-19 deaths on Dr. Anthony Fauci, some party members are zeroing in on his dismissal of their alternative “cures” to the virus.

Peter Navarro, who is currently serving as a senior counselor to President Donald Trump, whined to C-Span Wednesday that Fauci had interrupted his hydroxychloroquine business at the height of the pandemic.

“I had a million doses of hydroxychloroquine in warehouses … that I was trying to distribute to hospitals, and he got the FDA to stop me from doing that,” Navarro said. “Thousands of people could be here in this country right now alive if I had been able to distribute that, take that to the bank, that’s what the science says.”

Extensive clinical trials have repeatedly debunked that hydroxychloroquine—an antimalarial drug predominantly used to treat lupus—could have been an effective treatment for Covid-19. The FDA revoked the drug’s emergency use authorization during Trump’s first term after emerging data made clear that it did not treat or prevent Covid-19 but instead had the potential to create dangerous heart palpitations, cause liver or kidney damage, and cause serious gastrointestinal upset.

But six years later, Republicans are apparently still choosing to ignore the science.

In the midst of grilling a Fifth-pleading Fauci on Capitol Hill Wednesday, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson insisted that ivermectin—a drug used to treat heartworm in livestock, which was touted during the pandemic as another miracle cure—“worked.”

“When it comes to ivermectin … it works,” Johnson said, proceeding to wave a stack of papers while claiming that there were dozens of studies proving the efficacy of ivermectin against the coronavirus.

To this day, the FDA has only approved some ivermectin tablets at specific doses for human use, though their application is limited to treating parasitic worms. The FDA page on the matter still warns against the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19, asserting that “currently available clinical trial data do not demonstrate that ivermectin is effective” against the virus.

Furthermore, the FDA notes that taking ivermectin—or any drug dosed for an animal—can be dangerous, and that the agency has received “multiple reports” of hospitalizations after people have attempted to self-treat themselves with the drug.

A group of survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse are going door-to-door on Capitol Hill to deliver the government’s files to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The survivors gathered for a press conference at the National Mall Wednesday to launch the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile, which will carry bound copies of all 3.5 million files to communities across the country throughout the midterm elections.

As part of their launch, the survivors delivered printed copies straight to lawmakers’ offices, according to Miles Taylor, a former Trump official turned activist now involved with the bookmobile.

The survivors took copies of the files to members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which is set to vote on advancing acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s confirmation on Thursday.

Speaking at the press conference, the survivors urged against confirming Blanche, who only recently met with survivors after months of dodging victims and their demands for the Department of Justice to keep investigating. That meeting did not go well.

“A vote for Todd Blanche is a vote against justice,” Elizabeth Stein, an Epstein survivor and anti–human trafficking educator, said Wednesday.

Blanche previously tried to downplay the Epstein files’ thousands of redaction errors that exposed the names of survivors while concealing the identities of alleged perpetrators.

Blanche’s confirmation is already in jeopardy at the hands of his own party. Two Republican lawmakers are refusing to approve Blanche unless he puts in writing that Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is actually dead.

The federal government’s investigation into former FBI Director James Comey has taken some extremely bizarre steps.

Comey was charged with allegedly threatening violence against President Donald Trump in April with an Instagram post of numbers spelling out “86 47” in seashells. On Tuesday, Comey filed a motion to dismiss the case, and in that court filing, his lawyers listed some drastic steps taken by the authorities.

The Department of Justice spoke to former mafia boss Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano in an attempt to prove that the “86” in Comey’s post was an allusion to murder. But Gravano’s interview didn’t help their case, as he pointed out that real organized crime figures would think using the term was too obvious.

Gravano also suggested the FBI should contact former federal prosecutor and judge John Gleeson for his opinion on the term, only for Gleeson to say, “The claim that ‘86’ is mafia jargon for ‘kill’ is preposterous.” Gleeson, who prosecuted notable organized crime cases, said that in thousands of hours of debriefings and conversations with mobsters, he had never heard the term used that way.

Federal agents also used emergency cell phone tracking, which doesn’t require a warrant, to monitor Comey’s location while he was driving from North Carolina to Virginia shortly after he made the post. That location tracking is only supposed to be used in extreme situations, such as an “imminent threat to life or limb.”

No such emergency existed, and one Secret Service agent later said in a memo that “we did not believe that anyone’s life was in immediate danger and legally it was a bad idea to ping the phone.”

Trump fired Comey in 2017 over the federal investigation into Russia’s involvement in the 2016 presidential election, and has targeted the former FBI director in his second term as president. This case against Comey has fallen apart several times already, and has only recently been revived by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. It seems destined to fail yet again.