MAGA Senator Gripes About Dems Calling Out Tax Fraud and Sex Abuse

Senate Judiciary Democrats used their final moments ahead of Todd Blanche’s nomination vote Tuesday to remind the committee of numerous reasons why the acting attorney general should not be permanently promoted—but apparently all Republicans heard was a bunch of “whining.”

Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt was quick to mock his Democratic committee colleagues, sharing a derogatory note on X that he penned during the proceedings.

​​“So much whining!” the note read.

Schmitt’s language is an interesting choice, considering that the “whining” was an explicit exploration of why Donald Trump’s personal attorney should not have the keys to the Justice Department.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse referred to Blanche’s botched rollout of the Epstein files as just one reason why he should be disqualified from consideration. Whitehouse reminded the committee that even other Trump officials—notably, former Attorney General Pam Bondi—said Blanche was responsible for the bungled release.

Senator Dick Durbin effectively accused Blanche of violating his oath of office by having “aided and abetted the most corrupt administration in the history of the United States” rather than “serving the American people and upholding the rule of law and the Constitution.”

Durbin further accused Blanche—who is, again, in the running to be America’s preeminent lawyer—of lying under oath about statements relating to Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund “to avoid offending President Trump.”

Other damning details cited by Democrats involved Blanche’s personal role in crafting the collusive settlement between the DOJ, Trump’s personal attorneys, and the IRS that laid the groundwork for the taxpayer-funded honeypot. Liberal lawmakers also chided Blanche’s utilization of the Justice Department within his current limited capacity to target Trump’s perceived political enemies with bogus criminal cases.

Democrats noted that Blanche still had not walked back a deal to protect Trump, a convicted tax fraudster, against future IRS investigations.

But perhaps most scathing were the repeat references to Blanche’s bad lawyering. Democrats pointed to a petition signed by hundreds of Blanche’s former colleagues that claimed Blanche was simply unfit to be America’s top law enforcement official. The New York City Bar Association also protested Blanche’s nomination, accusing Blanche of having dubious ethical standards that failed to meet the standard required by the office.

Schmitt’s dismissive tone could only suggest that he either didn’t listen to the complaints or he simply doesn’t care.

It’s been only a few days since federal prosecutors moved to dismiss criminal charges against former Olympian David Hearn, and the Department of Justice’s remaining vandalism cases have already fallen apart like cheap pool lining. 

The DOJ indicated Monday night that it would not prosecute the remaining two defendants accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Cameron Thiers and Sophie Dennison-Gibby.

In a filing Friday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia acknowledged that damage to the Reflecting Pool was caused by the contractor’s flawed installation of the pool lining, and blamed the Department of the Interior for initially claiming that the damage was “entirely caused by vandals.” 

The government also quietly dismissed charges against defendant Justin Carreno on Friday.  

G. Allen Dale, an attorney representing Thiers, told NPR News that, after the filing about Hearn, there was no way to keep the rest of the government’s cases afloat. 

“Anyone who’s read the pleading that was filed in Mr. Hearn’s case would understand exactly why they would have to dismiss against the remainder of those charged,” Dale said. 

The move to dismiss charges against Hearn sparked major backlash from President Donald Trump, who’d hand-picked Atlantic Industrial Coating for the project and spent weeks blaming vandals for the contractor’s apparently shoddy workmanship. 

He railed against U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for dropping the Hearn case, saying Monday she “choked.”

Republican Senator Thom Tillis doesn’t think highly of acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, but he voted to confirm him anyway.

Tillis, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, gave a long-winded defense of his support for Blanche on the Senate floor Tuesday, even as he admitted that this Justice Department seems particularly bad.

“Everybody has this view that they are as pure as the driven snow and it’s the other side that has a problem. I think we both have a problem, folks. If you want to talk about weaponization, take a look at the Biden administration, take a look at the Obama administration,” Tillis said.

“The bottom line is, nobody is clean here, and until we start recognizing this behavior as bad, we’re just going to one-up it. Maybe it’s a little bit more intense in this administration than the last one, and that a little bit more intense the prior administration, and so on and so forth, but folks, we’ve got to end this stuff. We do,” Tillis continued. “I’m gonna support Mr. Blanche’s nomination, but what I hope I see out of him is a bending of the curve of this absurdity.”

Tillis’s excuse doesn’t hold up very well. Tillis was one of two Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee withholding his vote to support Blanche over President Trump’s settlement with the IRS, which created a $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” and gave Trump and his family immunity from IRS audits.

But over the weekend, Tillis, along with Republican Senator John Cornyn, changed his mind following a written statement from the Department of Justice in which Blanche purportedly agreed to end the Anti-Weaponization Fund. However, that memo still left open the preservation of the fund, as well as Trump’s immunity from IRS audits, as Democrats quickly pointed out.

Tillis seems to know all of this, based on his statement Tuesday. But even though he’ll be out of the Senate next year, he’s putting politics over principle.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went mask-off last week, promising behind closed doors to roll back abortion access even further, and telling religious pro-life hard-liners that he wanted the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturning the right to abortion to become “permanent in every single state.”

Blanche made the comments in a “prayer call” last Thursday hosted by the White House Faith Office and attended by various faith leaders. The call was not open to press and not on the record, although the entirety of the call is now up on YouTube.  

“We don’t have complete victory yet, but we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent,” Blanche said. “If states have said, ‘We are going to protect the unborn and we’re going to protect every life from the moment of conception,’ we’re putting practices and policies in place so that other states and other organizations can’t attack that.”

“They can’t do things like they’re doing with mailing in mail-order drugs,” Blanche added, singling out abortion pills.

This is a far cry from the answer he offered at his confirmation hearing, when he claimed he would “carefully evaluate every lawful action available to ensure the faithful enforcement of the Comstock Act,” the 150-year-old law that bans the mailing of contraceptives and other things considered to be “obscene.”  

He also noted that the Trump administration is “putting practices and policies in place” to block abortion pills mifepristone and misoprostol from being sent to states that have banned abortion, a process that would require the Justice Department to invoke the Comstock Act—something President Trump specifically said he wouldn’t do back in 2024 while campaigning. 

“A vote to confirm Todd Blanche is a vote ‘so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state,’” Senator Patty Murray wrote Tuesday on X. “Those were his own words to anti-abortion extremists. Senators who vote for Blanche are voting for an Attorney General who will attack abortion rights in EVERY state.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee confirmed Todd Blanche to run the Justice Department Tuesday, advancing Blanche’s nomination for attorney general to the Senate floor.

Democrats on the committee dissented, arguing that Donald Trump’s blindly loyal former personal attorney should not have the keys to America’s top law enforcement agency.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse remarked that it was a “sad and embarrassing day for this committee,” right before Blanche’s nomination moved forward solely on a party-line vote. Whitehouse noted that Blanche was “probably the most discreditable person ever to seek the office of attorney general of the United States.”

Outgoing Republican Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, who held up Blanche’s nomination until the acting attorney general vaguely assured them he would end Trump’s $1.8 billion slush fund, ultimately cracked under the pressure and fell in line with their party earlier this week.

Yet even Blanche’s former colleagues could see that he wasn’t right for the monumental role. Prior to the vote, hundreds of federal prosecutors urged the Senate to reject Blanche’s bid. In a joint memo, the cohort questioned whether the Justice Department would continue to exist as an entity that serves the American people—and whether the American people would continue to have faith in its abilities to serve them—if it remained under Blanche’s control.

They cited Blanche’s willingness to fire career prosecutors and FBI agents to satisfy Trump’s political interests, his belief that Trump has a “right” and a “duty” to shape federal probes, his mishandling of the Epstein files and repeat refusals to meet with the sex trafficker’s victims, and the DOJ’s $1.8 billion slush fund as just a handful of examples that have so far tanked their faith in Blanche’s abilities to remain independent of the White House.

This story has been updated.