A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
President Trump's former personal attorney is in the hot seat on Capitol Hill today.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is up for a confirmation hearing to lead the Justice Department permanently. In a few minutes, we'll speak with one of the senators due to question Blanche today. Democratic Senator Adam Schiff has accused Blanche of misconduct, saying he failed to recuse himself from cases involving his former client, the president. Blanche has a narrow path to confirmation in the Senate, where Republicans hold a slim majority.
MARTÍNEZ: NPR justice correspondent Ryan Lucas is covering this. Ryan, should be a spicy one today.
RYAN LUCAS, BYLINE: Yeah. I expect this to be a tense hearing today, and that's because in this second Trump administration, the Justice Department has been in turmoil. It has been at the center of a number of political firestorms, and Blanche himself has been in the thick of all of it. He is seen as a Trump loyalist. He'd previously served as Trump's personal attorney. And then when Trump returned to office, he named Blanche to be the No. 2 official at the Justice Department. Blanche then became acting attorney general in April after Trump pushed out his first attorney general, Pam Bondi.
Trump has liked what he's seen from Blanche in the past couple months. He nominated him for the job full-time. But Democrats - and it has to be said, a few Republicans - have concerns about Blanche's track record over the past 18 months at the department, and so I expect him to get tough questions about that today.
MARTÍNEZ: What do you think will be the focus of what the senators will try to grill him about?
LUCAS: Well, look, Democrats have a whole bunch of issues that they're going to want to get into with Blanche. They say that he has destroyed the Justice Department's traditional independence from the White House. They say that he's made it subservient to the president, weaponized it to go after Trump's perceived political enemies. And there's a long list of Trump critics who have faced DOJ investigations or prosecutions.
Perhaps most notably, former FBI Director James Comey, who has been indicted twice by this Justice Department. Democrats also have questions about Blanche's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, whether the Justice Department and Blanche specifically did anything to try to shield President Trump from embarrassment in those files. And then there's the $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund that the department agreed to set up as part of a settlement with Trump to end his lawsuit against the IRS.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. And that's the anti-weaponization fund that the Justice Department says is not going forward.
LUCAS: That's right. The fund has been scrapped. Yes. But the part of the settlement that shields Trump and his family from audits of past tax returns, that remains in place, and Democrats view that as Exhibit A of what they say is Blanche working in Trump's interest instead of the public interest. It's also worth noting here that a federal judge this week blasted both Trump and the Justice Department over the settlement. The judge said Trump's lawsuit was brought in bad faith in order to manipulate the judicial process and try to use the court to provide a degree of legitimacy to the eventual settlement.
MARTÍNEZ: Yeah. No, right, I remember Republicans were opposed. There were some, at least, who were opposed to this anti-weaponization fund. Does that mean that Todd Blanche might be in trouble?
LUCAS: Well, look, you're right. There were Republicans who pushed back forcefully against the anti-weaponization fund, and that played a big part in Blanche's decision to declare the fund dead. One Republican senator who spoke out against that fund was North Carolina's Thom Tillis. He is a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee that Blanche is going to be appearing before today. It's unclear at this point which way Tillis will ultimately fall on Blanche's nomination. But what is clear is that Democrats are united in opposition, and that means that Blanche doesn't have a lot of room for error here.
Remember, Republicans have a very slim majority in the Senate, even more so since Kentucky's Mitch McConnell remains out because of health issues, and so that means that only a couple of GOP defections could kill Blanche's nomination. So I'm going to be watching for how Blanche tries to thread that needle to keep every Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and those in the full Senate as well, on side with his appearance today.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. That's NPR's Ryan Lucas. Ryan, thanks.
LUCAS: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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