Todd Blanche, Trump's former personal defense lawyer who has run the Justice Department as acting attorney general, is now before the Senate for confirmation as attorney general, and the opposition is led by the people his department was supposed to serve.
Jeffrey Epstein's survivors released a video urging senators to vote against him. “He failed victims everywhere,” the PSA argues, citing his handling of the Epstein files. The objection is documented in this tracker's own entries: Blanche declared on Fox News that “we have released everything... we are not sitting on a single piece of paper” while millions of reviewed pages remained unreleased; seventeen survivors said his claim to have met with them was false; New Mexico's attorney general says his department is still withholding the Zorro Ranch records; and the New York Times reported he joined a White House Situation Room meeting about minimizing the files' political damage to Trump.
The New York City Bar Association formally opposed the nomination, calling him “unfit” for the office. And Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Patty Murray wrote to Blanche demanding he actually meet with survivors by July 28, writing: “Your responsibility as Acting Attorney General is to pursue justice, not to shield the President.”
Elevating the president's own criminal-defense lawyer to attorney general, over the recorded objections of the bar of the nation's largest city and the survivors of the case he is accused of burying, would formalize what the acting arrangement already was (see Acting AG Blanche Claims 'All' Epstein Files Have Been Released. The DOJ's Own Records Show Only 50%., Epstein Survivors Say Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche Falsely Told Senators He Had Met With Them, New Mexico's Attorney General Says Trump's Justice Department Is Withholding the Records His Epstein Ranch Prosecution Would Be Built On and 101 Former Judges File an Ethics Complaint Against Acting AG Todd Blanche Over Political Prosecutions, the Epstein Files, and the $1.776 Billion Fund).
The administration itself then conceded part of the survivors' case. On Joe Rogan's podcast, Vice President JD Vance said of the Epstein files: “If people want to say we mishandled the Epstein release, guilty. We did mishandle it, especially the communications of it,” and volunteered that Pam Bondi's binders-on-my-desk claim made “people mistrust the entire effort.” The admission, offered as a communications critique, is the administration's clearest acknowledgment that its handling of the files became indefensible, even as Blanche's confirmation to run the department that handled them proceeds. Rep. Yassamin Ansari went further, saying Blanche “must be investigated.”