Cornyn won't 'cave' on Blanche, he says

WASHINGTON — The odds of the Senate confirming Todd Blanche to head the Justice Department before its summer break appear to be dwindling, as the Trump administration struggles to appease GOP holdouts.

And if senators can’t get him through, President Donald Trump threatened to merely wait out the objectors, leaving Blanche in the post as acting attorney general and then trying again once Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, whose terms expire Jan. 3, are no longer in the picture.

“I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday.

Despite a flurry of back-and-forth red-lines with the Justice Department, Cornyn said Thursday morning that he still wasn’t satisfied. He wants to see changes to a controversial settlement that created a $1.8 billion “weaponization” compensation fund and immunized Trump and his family from tax audits.

“I don’t know whether they think they can wait us out or … we’ll cave,” Cornyn said of the Trump administration. “But I assure you, we won’t.”

“Look, you want to be recalcitrant, you know, win a battle, lose a war … Everybody has that right to do it. It makes no sense to me,” Tillis said in response to Trump’s post. “The president’s not winning on this issue. … And now it looks like they weren’t being honest when they said (the fund) was inoperative.”

Cornyn wants Blanche, who brokered the settlement announced in May, to commit “in writing” to certain guardrails on its scope. Without that, Cornyn and Tillis signaled they would vote down Blanche’s bid in committee.

Tillis said the issue has since been elevated above Blanche, where “at least one person in the White House, not the president,” has yet to be convinced. And Cornyn suggested he and Tillis aren’t the only Republican senators who have concerns, even if others haven’t aired them as publicly.

“Whoever told the president this was a good posture couldn’t answer my phones,” Tillis said. “It comes down to one or two bad advisers.”

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., sounded a more hopeful note, even after Trump’s post Thursday morning. He said it’s still the “goal obviously to get him confirmed, but we got to get him out of the committee first — and that’s going to require a resolution on the issues that Senators Cornyn and Tillis raised.”

“I think there’s a path forward,” Thune said. “I think we could get him confirmed, if not obviously this week now, but next week still.”

The snafu already forced Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, to postpone a markup on Blanche’s nomination that had been scheduled for Thursday morning.

If Blanche were to back up his sworn testimony before the Judiciary Committee by putting assurances in writing, that “would satisfy my concerns, because he said the weaponization fund is dead,” Cornyn said.

Still, Cornyn said the administration was “reluctant to change” the settlement, adding DOJ has not committed to ensuring the audit protections don’t extend beyond the parties to the lawsuit or guard against action from government entities other than the Internal Revenue Service.

“I think we were very close to resolving our differences in a way that was acceptable to the Department of Justice, but it’s clear that the president decided that was unacceptable. In other words, he’s not willing to permanently give up the weaponization fund or the enhanced audit protection,” Cornyn said Thursday afternoon.

Without a favorable vote from the Judiciary Committee, the Senate could in theory still act on Blanche’s nomination on the floor, but it would require more procedural steps.

“Right now I’m concentrating on the next few days to get this nomination through, and I’m not going to consider anything else,” Grassley said, when asked if it would be appropriate to leave Blanche in the post in an acting capacity through the end of the year as Trump suggested.

Cornyn and Tillis hold considerable sway on the Judiciary Committee, since Republicans can afford to lose only one GOP senator if all Democrats vote against advancing the nomination. Tillis is retiring at the end of this term, and Cornyn lost a bitter primary reelection battle after Trump endorsed his opponent, Ken Paxton.

At least one other GOP senator said she had been “hopeful” Cornyn’s push for changes would work.

“When it came to the anti-weaponization fund, when it came to the IRS settlement, I said, ‘I have real concerns about this,’” said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, describing a previous meeting with Blanche.

Tillis said it would be simple enough for the administration to disavow the weaponization fund, which he described as unpopular with voters.

“It gives the Democrats gold to mine between now and the election. This is about as politically tone deaf a posture as I have seen in this administration,” he said.

“It really just comes down to getting this kink in the slinky solved,” he added.

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

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