Todd Blanche Freaks Out Over Media Ban After Trump Bars CNN Again

Attorney General Todd Blanche crashed and burned while trying to defend President Donald Trump’s ever-increasing restrictions on the press.

Speaking on ABC’s This Week Sunday, Blanche struggled to keep his composure while facing questions about a federal judge’s temporary injunction on Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. 

Last week, a federal judge ruled that Trump’s decision had little to do with national security, as the Justice Department had argued in court, and that the president’s initial statements indicated that the ban stemmed from the media’s coverage of the Republican Party. 

“Well, I’m not going to get into what the judge says, the litigation is ongoing. But our position has been clear from the beginning. What they say is exactly the issue when it comes to national security,” Blanche said. 

When ABC host Martha Raddatz pressed him for a single example, Blanche appeared to claim that any negative reporting about the president was inaccurate. 

“Give you an example of when CNN doesn’t report accurately? You cannot be asking me that!” Blanche said. “They don’t even disagree. There’s not even a real dispute that the information coming out of CNN and some of these other networks is wholly and completely, almost 100 percent, negative towards the president.”

Raddatz reminded Blanche that the judge ruled that the ban had nothing to do with national security, and the attorney general doubled down.  

“At some point, the complete misinformation and the inaccuracy and the one-sided news out of certain organizations does become a national security issue and it’s not right for the people of the United States to have to put up with it,” Blanche said. 

Blanche blew up when Raddatz asked whether the Trump administration planned to screen reporters. 

“I did not say that! I did not say that! You don’t get to put words in my mouth! You don’t get to put words in my mouth! That’s not the way it works,” he cried. 

Then Blanche balked at a question about what the First Amendment meant to him, and insisted that news coverage did not have to be positive for the Trump administration. 

“But you heard what the president said: ‘They want to try to diminish the Republicans and a Republican administration,’” Raddatz said. 

“For you to pick out seven words and say, ‘Oh, that’s what the president means,’ that’s extraordinarily disingenuous,” Blanche said. 

Clearly, the Trump administration simply can’t stand when the press reports on what the president actually says. 

Despite the judge’s order, the Trump administration has continued to lash out at the press. Over the weekend, the president blocked CNN from traveling with him on Air Force One.

FBI Director Kash Patel appears to have spent his weekend schmoozing with a man his own department fired under suspicions of being a double agent in 2008.

Patel attended the wedding of former acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba, who resigned in disgrace in December.

On Sunday, Israeli-born federal prosecutor Sigal Chattah shared a photo from the festivities, featuring herself, Habba, her new billionaire husband Turhan Mildon, and Ali Abdelaziz, a former UFC manager and NYPD and FBI informant suspected of being a double agent.

According to the 2013 book Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America, Abdelaziz was initially hired by the NYPD to serve as a mole against Muslims of America, a Virginia-based group, but was dropped after they after administered a polygraph test and suspected he was a double agent. The FBI tried to deport him but was unable to, according to the book’s authors.

This is at least the second time Patel and Abdelaziz have been pictured together.

“Why, that’s Ali Abdelaziz is on the far left. Manages a lot of Russian, Belarusian and Chechen MMA fighters including Khamzat Chimaev, who is close to Kadyrov. Abdelaziz was an FBI informant until the Bureau dropped him because they suspected he was a double agent,” The Insider’s Michael Weiss wrote on X. “Looks like Ka$h (far right) has forgiven and forgotten. These MAGA weddings are Mos Eisley cantinas for counterintelligence.”

Patel also drew backlash for appearing with Chattah, who made headlines last year for allowing senior Israeli government official Tom Alexandrovich to return to Israel on bail after being arrested in a sting operation for soliciting sexual acts from a minor.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi warned that his country is “fully prepared for the war to be resumed” following President Trump’s threats to “annihilate” Iran during his U.N. General Assembly speech.

“We stand firm in the face of any new aggression, even if it comes to a doomsday war. It is up to President Trump to choose. He wanted unconditional surrender in the previous war in two days, and now, it is eight months they are fighting with no result. A new aggression would be certainly the same,” Araghchi said Sunday to Kristen Welker on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Donald Trump made an apocalyptic threat to Iran during his speech at the United Nations General Assembly Tuesday, where he mused about driving “them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations.” The crazed speech was met with walkouts from delegates, including the Iranian contingent.

Despite Trump’s ominous words, he seemed optimistic about a peace deal with Iran following his speech, with America’s Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner reportedly holding a three-hour meeting with Iranian representatives on the sidelines of the assembly. Iran offered a truce that involves reopening the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the U.S. ending its blockade of Iranian ports, lifting sanctions on Iranian oil exports, unfreezing an estimated $12 billion in Iranian assets, and a region-wide ceasefire that includes Yemen and Lebanon.

On Saturday, though, Trump rejected the proposal, claiming that Iran’s motivation for seeking a deal was because they are “losing so badly.”

“They want to make a deal, and I think that’s fine,” Trump said. “I’d like to make a deal too. But that deal would not be acceptable.”

Trump’s comments seem ignorant of the fact that Iran believes it is operating from a place of strength and remains defiant in the face of the U.S. president’s threats. The terms that Iran is offering are more favorable to itself and would require the U.S. to make concessions, albeit similar ones to June’s memorandum of understanding between the two countries that later fell apart.

But Trump continues to be stubborn, and the U.S. and global economies continue to suffer, along with civilians across the Middle East, as this war drags on with dwindling hopes for peace. Not even the impending midterm elections seem to be enough to spur Trump to push harder for a resolution.

What does it say that President Donald Trump’s biggest fans are starting to abandon him?

Fractures have begun to form among the Front Row Joes, a group of steadfast Trump supporters that devote their lives to attending every single one of the president’s rallies, Politico Playbook reported Monday. 

Rick Frazier, who’s been to more than 100 Trump rallies, told Playbook he wasn’t planning to vote in November’s midterm elections. He claimed that Trump “can’t be trusted.”

“Epstein crimes and feeding the industrial military complex … those are big nos for me,” Frazier told Playbook. “He promoted himself as a no-war president. That didn’t work out.”

Frazier told Playbook that 95 percent of the Joes, however, were still “unwavering.” But some are breaking away.

The first major defector was Trisha Hope, who joined the Joes in 2018 and funded her travels by selling a book of Trump’s social media posts and swapping her apartment in Austin for an R.V.

Hope defected in July 2025 after she watched Trump push back on a question about Jeffrey Epstein during a Cabinet meeting.  “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years,” the president said. 

“It was like a dagger in my heart,” Hope told Playbook. “It was like a light switch went on and a veil lifted, and I saw him for who he was, and I have not been able to unsee it since.”

After watching Trump’s handling of his military campaign in the Middle East, Hope’s concerns were validated. She believes he is a “fraud and a liar.”

“If we do lose the midterms and he is impeached again, I will be walking the halls of Congress in support of that impeachment,” Hope told Playbook.

Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary who produced a documentary about the Joes, told Playbook that the defections raise concerns ahead of the midterm elections about the attitudes of Trump’s soft supporters who were never die-hard MAGA fans.

With just weeks until the midterms, Trump appears to be in hot water with Republicans over his mishandling of the war against Iran and skyrocketing diesel prices. While Trump isn’t actually on the ballot this time around, the president has made every effort to make voters feel like he is. 

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, trying to refute corruption allegations, may have just proven them. 

Earlier this week, ProPublica exposed Collins’s involvement in an alleged illegal pay-to-play scheme with a defense contractor. Collins has denied the allegations.

“The Biden-led Justice Department and FBI totally cleared my office, my campaign and me five years ago of these seven-year-old allegations,” Collins told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. 

But as it turns out, Collins’s denials don’t add up. Collins’s claim that the Biden administration didn’t find any wrongdoing only applies to allegations as of 2021. The ProPublica article concerns allegations made by former Navatek CEO and Collins campaign donor Martin Kao from 2022 to 2024, which the FBI was still investigating until the probe was shut down during the current Trump administration. 

ProPublica also pointed out in its report that the defense contractor Navatek, which allegedly had Collins steer government contracts its way in exchange for campaign cash, didn’t provide anything of value to the people of Maine.

Steve Abbott, who is managing Collins’s reelection campaign, claimed at a press conference Wednesday that Navatek’s research in 2019 benefited the University of Maine, which used it to launch a new boat last month. He even held up pictures of the boat at the press conference. Unfortunately for him and Collins, the University of Maine debunked his claim.

“This most recent boat has no Navatek connection, and UMaine has not worked with Navatek since 2021,” the University of Maine’s Samantha Warren said.

Annie Clark, Collins’s deputy chief of staff, also attacked the ProPublica article, claiming that it relied on the “word of someone who pled guilty to five counts of money laundering, three counts of wire fraud, one count of bank fraud, and making false submissions to the FEC,” referring to Kao. 

ProPublica pointed out that it didn’t simply print Kao’s words at face value, but reviewed evidence gathered by the FBI, thousands of pages of legal records, and sources familiar with Navatek as well as the FBI’s investigation. 

All of this does not reflect well on Collins in the midst of a tough reelection campaign against former Maine state Senator Troy Jackson, who is polling neck and neck with her in a year when Republicans are historically unpopular. In November, Maine voters may choose to reject a  senator surrounded by corruption who supports a corrupt president.