Surprise! Todd Blanche Immediately Breaks His Promises to GOP Senators

It’s been less than 24 hours, and freshly sworn-in Attorney General Todd Blanche has already issued entirely new legal protections for President Donald Trump.

In a memo published Monday evening, just hours after Blanche’s swearing-in ceremony, the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel argued that the president could claim executive privilege over communication between him and his “private advisers,” provided that the communications were confidential and related to his presidential “decisionmaking.”

The memo also seemed to expand executive privilege to apply to communications between the president’s “direct advisers” and civilians.

If the Democrats take back the House of Representatives in the upcoming midterm elections, this memo could have major implications for any investigation into the president and other top administration officials. Clearly, the Trump administration is preparing to stonewall Congress.

Blanche’s latest move reflects poorly on all of the Republicans who voted to confirm him—but especially Senators Bill Cassidy, John Cornyn, and Tom Tillis, who bought into the attorney general’s promises to limit the scope of a different immunity for the president. Blanche has demonstrated that he isn’t the least bit interested in holding the president accountable for anything—let alone preserving transparency in government. But we already knew that, didn’t we?

In a statement Tuesday morning, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the memo revealed that Trump was “petrified of the questions a Democratic Congress will demand answers to.”

President Trump—one of the most corrupt U.S. presidents ever—thinks that it would be a “terrible mistake” for FIFA to push out Gianni Infantino, the organization’s embattled president.

“FIFA would be making a terrible mistake if, for any reason, they even considered replacing President Gianni Infantino. He is fantastic, having just presided over the most successful World Cup, by four times, ever presented,” Trump wrote Monday night on Truth Social. “If he is gone, it will never be as successful or profitable again! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Much of the soccer world sees Infantino’s tenure much differently. After a secret plan concocted by Infantino to sell a substantial stake of the World Cup to private investors leaked, the soccer confederations that lead Europe, Asia, and North and Central America and the Carribean turned on the FIFA chief. UEFA, which governs European football, is currently boycotting all FIFA competitions until Infantino leaves office; earlier this week, the three confederations accused Infantino of a “fundamental breach of trust” and “deception” in an open letter and announced that they would hold their own competitions if he remained in power.

“Leadership in football is not a possession. It is not about holding—or demanding— power to be held. It is a duty of service to the football family that entrusts it,” the letter reads. “When trust is broken through deception, when an individual places himself above the collective that entrusted him with authority, that duty has been abandoned.”

Even still, Trump’s support for Infantino makes sense. The two have been closely linked since Trump returned to the White House; last December, Infantino awarded Trump the FIFA Peace Prize—a pitiful sham of an award that was given solely to curry favor with Trump while he continued to mope about not winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Now Trump is returning the favor, sort of. An unhinged post on social media, after all, is probably his equivalent of a made-up prize.

If President Trump’s disastrous renovation of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool gets investigated, a Project 2025 operative will be overseeing it.

Trump nominated Dennis Kirk, an author of the conservative manifesto and former adviser to Tulsi Gabbard, as the Department of the Interior’s inspector general. Kirk, who worked in the Office of Personnel Management in Trump’s first term, would oversee any probes into alleged malfeasance or corruption within the Cabinet department.

Kirk created a training video for Project 2025 and wrote an essay warning against “progressive ideology” in the federal workforce. As inspector general, he’d be in charge of ethics investigations in the Interior Department, as well as closer looks at Trump’s pet building projects in Washington, D.C., including the $16 million renovation of the Reflecting Pool.

The move immediately drew backlash from Democrats. Representative Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee, called Kirk a “fake and fraudulent watchdog” in a statement last week.

“[The inspector general’s office] is weighing serious ethics investigations into senior officials in this administration. It’s no surprise the White House suddenly wants its own man inside the one place that Trump’s cronies still have reason to fear,” Huffman said.

The Reflecting Pool project is a disaster, with a peeling and tattered “American flag blue” paint job ruined by hydrogen peroxide that was added to kill algae. Trump pushed an unfounded vandalism allegation and had the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro try to prosecute people who simply got close to or touched the pool and its peeling paint. Those charges all fell through.

David Hearn, an ex-Olympian who faced spurious vandalism charges that were later dropped, is exploring legal options against the federal government, and Democrats are looking to investigate the project and botched prosecutions by seeking documents from the Interior and Justice Departments. That effort could run into Kirk, a conservative operative and Trump loyalist.

A previous Interior Department inspector general, Mark Lee Greenblatt, doesn’t have confidence in Kirk’s ability to carry out the job, saying to The Hill last week that “the chilling effect on whistleblowers is real.”

“Who would jeopardize their careers by submitting a complaint about an administration official to an I.G. who is avowedly aligned with the administration?” Greenblatt said.

The Trump administration is targeting military spouses and their families for deportation. Now congressional Democrats are launching an investigation.

In a letter sent Sunday, a group of more than 60 Democrats accused the Department of Defense of collaborating with the Department of Homeland Security to detain and remove hundreds U.S. servicemembers, veterans, and their families. The letter writers noted that military recruiters are still promising immigration protections, even as the federal government pulls back those policies.

“These efforts imperil military readiness, weaken service members’ morale, and betray America’s promises to the people who put their lives on the line for our nation,” the letter said. The effort was led by Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

Last week, the Associated Press reported that the Trump administration had detained more than 50 military members’ spouses and parents. The report followed the president’s evidently hollow gesture to form a Military Spouse Commission.

In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement rescinded its long-standing policy that treated military service as a “significant mitigating factor” when deciding whether to pursue immigration enforcement, and issued a rule stating that military service alone “does not automatically exempt” non-citizens from being swept up in enforcement actions.

A few months earlier, amid sweeping immigration enforcement operations across the country, recruiters for the U.S. military and National Guard urged high school students to join their ranks in order to protect their immigrant families.

In response to queries from lawmakers, the DOD has continued to insist there have been no recent policy changes. Democrats claim the Trump administration is misleading the public and U.S. servicemembers and luring them and their families into a trap.

“Donald Trump is breaking our country’s promises to servicemembers by tearing apart dozens of military families who were promised immigration protections,” Warren said. “That’s just plain cruel, and it’s hurting our military readiness and morale.”

The Democrats warned that if the DOD was involved in the immigration enforcement actions, that would violate the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits using the U.S. military to enforce domestic laws. They also warned that if U.S. military servicemembers were detained, it could violate the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, which provides protections to all active duty military members, including non-citizens, from immigration proceedings and other civil actions that interfere with their military duties.

The coalition of lawmakers demanded that the DHS, DOD, and the Department of Veterans Affairs provide answers to a range of questions about protections for U.S. military servicemembers by August 23.

Outgoing Senator Bill Cassidy—an on-again, off-again thorn in President Trump’s side—is now lambasting the president for his Monday executive order to divide the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, childhood vaccine schedule into three separate shots instead of one, falsely linking the previous protocol to autism.

“We want three separate vaccinations given at separate times. Together there could be a possibility they’re quite lethal, and separately it looks like they are not at all lethal,” Trump said at the signing event, baselessly suggesting that the shots kids have been receiving for years were killing them.

“I’m a doctor. This executive order is wrong. The President does not have the expertise to make these changes. Vaccines are overwhelmingly safe. Vaccines are effective. Vaccines DO NOT cause autism,” Cassidy wrote Monday on X. “Breaking up vaccines will mean children have to get more shots to get the same protection, not fewer shots. It will increase hesitancy and make children less safe. Parents should listen to their child’s pediatrician about vaccines rather than listening to an inaccurate executive order. This is so wrong.”

Cassidy is right. This policy is nonsensical and likely be a hard threshold to meet for many families, leading in turn to sicker kids and adults. But hearing it from him is especially rich given that he cast the decisive vote to confirm Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who also lacks the expertise to make massively consequential health decisions like this.

Cassidy also recently backed Kennedy’s pick for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention head, Erica Schwartz—even though she gave no guarantees on vaccination scheduling. For what it’s worth, the CDC officially states that there’s “no published scientific evidence [that] shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots.”