Recent Senate hearings for Todd Blanche, the president’s nominee for attorney general, didn’t change what has become obvious over the past year he has spent in a senior leadership role at the Department of Justice: He’s unfit for the top job.

Senators should make clear to the White House that they won’t consent to his appointment, whether this year or next, as the White House mulls postponing the vote.

Blanche, previously the president’s personal lawyer, came to the DOJ in 2025 as a deputy attorney general. Under his leadership, the department has pursued an array of politically charged investigations or prosecutions against the administration’s opponents, including former CIA Director John Brennan, former FBI Director James Comey and former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson.

He has boasted of pushing out more than 200 staffers who worked on the president’s criminal cases and has tried to intimidate protesters, judges and the former US pardon attorney, among others.Blanche also bungled the administration’s handling of evidence in the Jeffrey Epstein case.

He oversaw the public release of files that included personal details of Epstein’s victims but didn’t initially disclose information that might’ve been damaging for the president. Blanche even conducted a jailhouse interview with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving time for her role in Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls, in a highly unusual move that was widely interpreted as an attempt to manage the political fallout of the case.

More egregiously, Blanche endorsed the president’s decision to pardon even the worst and most violent of those convicted for the Jan. 6 riot and has supported efforts to dismiss pending cases and unwind prosecutions. He has also defended a $1.8 billion fund that would’ve been used to pay people claiming to have been wronged by the government for political reasons — a proposal that certainly looked as though it was meant to reward Jan. 6 defendants and other allies of the president.

Fortunately, the public uproar over the plan (including opposition from Republicans in Congress) forced Blanche to pull it, although he has refused to put down in writing that he won’t revive the idea.

This isn’t the record of a judicious and independent official. It’s the record of an overt partisan with poor judgment who has no business working at the Department of Justice, let alone leading it. Those Republican senators who have expressed skepticism of his nomination, including Thom Tillis and John Cornyn, should stick to their guns and demand someone more qualified.

Under both Democratic and Republican presidents in recent decades, the DOJ has resisted efforts to politicize justice and undermine the rule of law — not always flawlessly, but mostly successfully. Blanche has thrown that tradition out the window.

Senators should toss his nomination out too.

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