WASHINGTON – Todd Blanche, the attorney who defended Donald Trump through two criminal trials and was nominated to lead the Justice Department, cannot get a confirmation vote. The obstacle is not his record. It is the president he served.
Two Senate Republicans, John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, are blocking Blanche’s nomination over a $1.8 billion fund that Trump’s Justice Department established to compensate those it says were wrongfully prosecuted during the Biden administration, according to PBS NewsHour. The fund, framed by Trump and his allies as a remedy for political persecution, has become a point of open defiance from Republican senators who see it as insulating the president and his associates from legal accountability.
The fund’s structure reinforces that concern. Its provisions include an agreement with the Internal Revenue Service to exempt Trump, his relatives, his companies, and their “affiliates” from routine audits, a carveout without precedent in federal law. For Cornyn and Tillis, the problem is not merely that the fund exists. It is that they believe it should be eliminated entirely before Blanche leads the department responsible for administering it.
Trump responded to the stall not with concession but with threat. He suggested he might temporarily withdraw Blanche’s nomination, wait for Cornyn and Tillis to leave office, and resubmit. The statement, intended to signal he would outlast the opposition, produced the opposite effect in the Senate. Tillis said publicly that Trump’s remarks proved the administration intended to revive the fund eventually, whatever assurances Blanche might offer in the interim. The nomination remains on hold.
The situation places Blanche in an unusual position. His path to the attorney generalship runs through a conflict between the president who nominated him and senators from the president’s own party whose votes he cannot afford to lose. His views on the anti-weaponization fund have been deliberately understated, a strategy that has not worked. The longer the standoff continues, the more it becomes a referendum on Trump’s legal self-protection apparatus rather than on Blanche himself.
Blanche’s confirmation challenges have not been limited to the fund. Four federal judges in Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, and Minnesota criticized him by name in opinions issued in unrelated cases, an occurrence rare enough to draw notice from legal observers. Judges typically address parties and arguments rather than individual lawyers, and the pattern across four states and four separate cases suggested that Blanche’s conduct as an advocate had generated friction beyond what his confirmation hearings had made public.
The Senate’s Republican caucus carries a long memory for Blanche’s work on the Epstein file. Cornyn’s own position on the nomination was uncertain until recently, shaped in part by pressure from Epstein survivors and advocacy groups who argued that Blanche’s ties to Trump created conflicts in overseeing the Epstein investigation. Questions about Blanche’s conduct in meetings with Epstein survivors, described by participants as abrasive, added texture to a nomination that had already accumulated more friction than most.
The $1.8 billion figure is itself contested. Critics of the fund argue that its design makes it less a legal remedy than a political instrument. The criteria for eligibility are vague, disbursement decisions rest with executive officials, and the IRS audit exemption has no statutory basis. The administration has declined to publish a full accounting of how allocations will be determined or who will qualify beyond those already receiving payments.
Trump has been uncharacteristically patient with the confirmation stall, at least publicly. His threat to withdraw and resubmit Blanche’s name reads less as an operational plan than as a signal to his base that he views the senators’ objections as obstruction rather than principle. Whether patience will last if the standoff extends into fall is a question Republican aides declined to answer on the record.
The Senate Judiciary Committee can advance the nomination without Cornyn and Tillis if Republicans on the panel hold together. But a floor vote with two committed no votes in a narrow majority creates its own arithmetic problem, one the Republican leadership has not publicly addressed.
What remains clear is that the anti-weaponization fund has become something its architects did not intend: a liability for the attorney general nomination it was meant to precede. The fund was designed to signal that the administration would use the Justice Department to remedy what it called political persecution. Instead, it is preventing the administration from confirming the man it chose to run that department.
Blanche has not spoken publicly about the stall. The White House has not offered a timeline for resolving it. Cornyn and Tillis have not moved. The nomination sits where it has sat for weeks, waiting on a conflict that neither side in the Republican caucus appears positioned to resolve quietly.
