Senate panel postpones Blanche attorney general vote

The Senate Judiciary Committee will punt its vote on Todd Blanche’s bid to permanently head the Justice Department, after GOP holdouts on the panel said they weren’t satisfied.

Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, wants to nail down changes to a controversial settlement that created a $1.8 billion “weaponization” compensation fund before moving ahead with the panel’s vote, which had been scheduled for Thursday.

“We are working on getting a solution,” Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, said as he left Cornyn’s office Wednesday.

Hours later, committee staff announced the markup had been postponed to a later, unknown date.

Cornyn said he was supposed to meet with Blanche on Wednesday morning, but the meeting didn’t happen. According to Cornyn, he and his staff gave DOJ a “red-line strikeout” of potential changes.

“We’re trying to help them get to a conclusion here, and they won’t let us. It’s befuddling to me,” Cornyn said of DOJ.

The settlement announced in May was brokered by Blanche, who is currently overseeing the Justice Department as acting attorney general. Although Blanche told Cornyn at his confirmation hearing that the fund was “dead,” Cornyn wanted greater assurances.

“They refused to commit to writing what he testified to under oath, and it’s not a big ask,” Cornyn said, describing it as something that “could be solved in just a matter of seconds.”

The “anti-weaponization” fund was created as part of settling President Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service tied to the release of his tax returns during his first term in office. Its terms also immunize Trump and his family from tax audits.

Cornyn is pushing DOJ to clarify the scope of the settlement’s audit immunity, including the extent to which it would protect against actions by federal agencies other than the IRS or Treasury Department.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who shared Cornyn’s concerns about the fund, was also not a guaranteed vote for Blanche. Tillis said Wednesday that Cornyn was not “walking away from it” but rather being “realistic about planning a markup.”

Tillis said he was relying on Cornyn, a former Texas attorney general, to give him “the technical interpretation.”

“I don’t think there’s a game being played here. I think that Blanche genuinely wants to get it done because he recognizes it as the distraction that it is,” Tillis said. “It may mean that he’s got to go through and tell the boss or somebody else to sign off on it. But none of this is secret.”

As the day went on, Tillis told reporters it was “unlikely we could have all this settled tonight” and said he and Cornyn were “not prepared to vote yes yet” on Blanche.

In a statement Wednesday night, a spokesperson for the Judiciary Committee said, “Chairman Grassley works to set President Trump’s nominees up for success in committee, not failure. Senators Cornyn and Tillis want written assurances from the Department of Justice regarding the Trump-IRS settlement. Tomorrow’s markup is postponed as work continues to secure sufficient support in committee to favorably report Attorney General-nominee Todd Blanche, who is highly qualified for the job.”

The markup could be rescheduled for as early as Tuesday, Tillis predicted.

Tillis is retiring at the end of this term. Cornyn, who ran for reelection but lost in a bitter primary battle after Trump endorsed his opponent, Ken Paxton, is also not returning to Congress next year.

In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump told reporters he hadn’t heard of any hiccups with the Blanche nomination but suggested Cornyn might still be upset about the endorsement.

“I think that’s a convenient excuse for not cooperating with the Judiciary Committee’s appropriate role in the confirmation,” Cornyn said when asked about that characterization. “And it happens to be untrue.”

Cornyn and Tillis hold considerable sway on the committee, since Republicans can afford to lose only one GOP senator if all Democrats vote against advancing the nomination.

Blanche was on Capitol Hill on Wednesday and met with at least one GOP senator who does not sit on the Judiciary Committee: John Curtis of Utah. Blanche did not answer questions about the meeting when he departed.

The committee vote is not completely make-or-break for Blanche. Without a favorable report, a confirmation vote on the floor could still go ahead, but it would require more procedural steps. And experts say he could remain as acting attorney general for many months, if not longer, depending on the consent of Senate Republican leadership and the interpretation of federal statute.

Epstein questions

Blanche’s handling of the files of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein was also in the spotlight Wednesday, with survivors on Capitol Hill to talk with senators and their staff.

Many were angered by the way DOJ rolled out files to the public, with survivor Dani Bensky testifying this month that “the release of nude images of survivors, the outing of Jane Does and the exposure of more than 100 victims’ identifying information” retraumatized her and others.

Tillis had set the condition that the acting attorney general meet with those harmed by Epstein’s abuse, which Blanche did. But speaking to reporters on the Hill on Wednesday, Bensky said it fell short of what Tillis “had in mind.”

“The meeting was very condescending. It was a lot of talking in circles,” she said of the time with Blanche. “We walked away with no answers. It felt like a very no-win situation.”

Blanche “actually said the words, ‘get to the point’ to us,” Bensky said.

While Epstein died in 2019, his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, is still serving a federal prison sentence. On Wednesday senators agreed via unanimous consent to a resolution expressing the sense of the Senate that Maxwell shouldn’t receive a presidential pardon or clemency.

While the resolution is nonbinding, Sen. Jacky Rosen, D-Nev., said it sent a message ahead of any movement on Blanche and was glad no Republicans objected.

Maxwell “was convicted and sentenced” as a sex trafficker “and there is no way in hell with the things that she did or helped to do with any of those young women that she should be released from prison early,” Rosen said. “It’s a good day that [Republicans] had the common sense to think that sex traffickers shouldn’t be pardoned.”

Trump last year wouldn’t rule out the possibility of pardoning Maxwell, and Rosen said she worried about a quid pro quo situation: “I’ll say nice things if you promise me a pardon.”

Cornyn, however, said he remained focused on the weaponization fund. Asked about the Epstein survivors and their advocacy on the Hill, he told reporters, “I’m focused on other issues. It’s a terrible tragedy, but that’s between them and the attorney general.”

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(Nina Heller and John T. Bennett contributed to this report.)

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