What's documented

This is Part 2 of Advise and Consent. Part 1 looked at whether a senator's later claim of being misled holds up against the public record. Todd Blanche's case is structured differently — there's no senator here saying he broke a personal promise. Instead there's a documented, repeating pattern: a specific commitment, made on the record, followed by conduct that contradicts it, each time with a stated rationale attached. This piece tests those against each other.

Blanche was Donald Trump's personal criminal defense attorney before he was ever a DOJ official — he founded his own firm in April 2023 specifically to join Trump's defense team, then led the defense in the Manhattan hush-money trial (Trump convicted on all 34 felony counts, May 2024) and the two federal special-counsel cases. He was confirmed Deputy Attorney General on March 5, 2025, 52-46, a straight party-line vote with no Republican defections. In May 2025, while still DAG, Trump also installed him as Acting Librarian of Congress after firing incumbent Carla Hayden — an executive-branch DOJ official running a legislative-branch agency, a move legal scholars called constitutionally disputed. When Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi on April 2, 2026 amid the Epstein-files fallout, Blanche briefly held three titles simultaneously: Deputy AG, Acting AG, and Acting Librarian of Congress. He was confirmed as full Attorney General on August 8, 2026, 50-49 — his closest margin yet, with Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski voting no.

The pattern: five commitments, five contradictions

1. The Eric Adams case. At his February 12, 2025 confirmation hearing, Blanche testified under oath that he had no knowledge of the decision to dismiss the corruption case against NYC Mayor Eric Adams. Unsealed court documents — including then-Acting SDNY U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon's resignation letter — show that Acting Deputy AG Emil Bove discussed the dismissal with prosecutors nearly two weeks before that testimony. Every Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee formally asked DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz to investigate whether the sworn testimony violated federal false-statement law.

DOJ's stated rationale for the dismissal itself, from Bove's February 10, 2025 memo, was reached "without assessing the strength of the evidence or the legal theories on which the case is based" and argued the prosecution "unduly restricted Mayor Adams' ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration" — a stated public-safety and immigration-cooperation rationale, not a claim the case lacked merit. Sassoon's letter separately describes Adams's lawyers proposing what amounted to a quid pro quo in a January 31, 2025 meeting — dismissal in exchange for cooperation on enforcement priorities — and alleges Bove ordered a staffer's notes from that meeting confiscated. Eleven prosecutors resigned rather than carry out the dismissal, including three who said they refused a demand from Blanche that they "admit wrongdoing" as a condition of reinstatement, writing back: "We will not confess wrongdoing when there was none."

2. The recusal pledge. Under questioning from Sen. Adam Schiff at that same February 2025 hearing, Blanche pledged under oath: "I will follow the rules as told to me by the experts, career prosecutors in the department, if it comes to ever recusing." The following month, DOJ's own chief ethics lawyer, Joseph Tirrell, formally advised him that recusal from matters involving Trump personally was necessary. DOJ's stated position since: recusal would apply "to the extent" a live matter touches something Blanche personally worked on for Trump, but that this remains "a hypothetical" — i.e., DOJ says no matter has yet triggered the obligation, per a department spokeswoman. Tirrell was fired in July 2025, months before the recusal question resurfaced publicly in 2026, with no reason given at the time. CNN reported in May 2026 that Blanche never recused despite the advice. Sen. Schiff has opened a formal inquiry.

3. The crypto ethics pledge. As part of his 2025 confirmation, Blanche signed an ethics agreement committing to divest his crypto holdings within 90 days and not act on matters affecting his financial interest in virtual currency until he did. On April 7, 2025 — while ProPublica later reported he still held between $159,000 and $485,000 in crypto assets — he signed the "Ending Regulation by Prosecution" memo, disbanding DOJ's National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and ending prosecution of regulatory-type crypto violations. The memo's stated rationale: "The Justice Department is not a digital assets regulator," framing the industry as "critical to the Nation's economic development and innovation" and tying the policy to a presidential directive to end "regulatory weaponization against digital assets" — a genuine, separately stated policy position, not one that mentions his own holdings. He didn't divest for nearly two more months, and did so by transferring the assets to his adult children and a grandchild rather than selling them. Six senators formally called it a "glaring" conflict of interest; ethics specialists Virginia Canter and Kedric Payne both said it violated his own pledge.

4. Epstein files transparency. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed November 19, 2025, bars withholding records on grounds of "embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity." Blanche told Congress DOJ's review was complete and instructed not to redact on that basis, and DOJ has separately said it's withholding "millions of pages" as privileged or irrelevant. By mid-2026, roughly 200,000 pages turned out to still be withheld on claimed-privilege grounds, and a federal judge found DOJ in violation of the statute — a finding DOJ called a "perverse interpretation" aimed at "driving misleading headlines." Blanche's own account of the rollout itself is a partial one: he's said DOJ "failed" by inadvertently exposing some victims' identifying information, but maintains officials "never wanted to release a single victim's name" and that the errors affected a small share of the roughly 6 million pages processed.

5. DOJ independence. This is not a broken promise so much as a promise declined outright, and it happened this week. Asked directly on NBC's Meet the Press, August 16, 2026, whether he could pledge DOJ would always act independently of the White House, Blanche said: "No, I'm not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that." Pressed further: "Will I take the president of the United States's view on something into consideration? Yes, of course. And I hope every attorney general in history would not answer that question differently." He denied specific case-by-case direction from Trump: "There is this extraordinarily false narrative that the president wakes up in the morning and calls me and says, 'Todd, go prosecute X or Y.' He does not do that."

Is this just party politics?

Unlike the RFK Jr. confirmation, no single senator negotiated a specific list of commitments from Blanche in exchange for a swing vote — his March 2025 Deputy AG confirmation was a clean party-line 52-46, zero Republican defections, no reported holdouts. What changed by August 2026 is worth stating plainly: after the recusal non-compliance, the Adams-case testimony contradiction, the crypto conflict, and the Epstein files non-compliance finding were all already public and documented, his AG confirmation vote was 50-49 — his own closest margin yet, though not the narrowest Trump cabinet-level confirmation this term overall (Pete Hegseth's Defense Secretary vote required a 50-50 vice-presidential tiebreaker in January 2025). Collins and Murkowski voted no; Sens. Cornyn and Tillis secured a $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund" rescission before voting yes — a concession that turned out to be less final than it looked. On the same August 16 Meet the Press appearance, asked whether he'd tell Trump no if the president asked him to revive the fund, Blanche pointed to Trump's own "it's dead" comments rather than answering directly, and when pressed on whether Jan. 6 defendants could still be compensated through a different channel — DOJ's judgment fund — he declined to rule it out: "I don't know... I'm not going to comment on a hypothetical case today." Trump has separately said he wishes the fund weren't dead. That's a real, measurable shift: the same record that produced zero defections in 2025 produced two defections and a forced concession in 2026. It complicates a flat "it's all just party politics" answer — the record moved votes, just not enough of them, and not toward a no.

What can I do

Sen. Schiff's recusal inquiry and the Judiciary Committee Democrats' request for an Inspector General investigation into the Adams-case testimony are both live and public. Contacting members of the Senate Judiciary Committee to ask for a status update on IG Horowitz's review is a specific, real ask — not a symbolic one, since that inquiry's outcome is the closest thing to an actual mechanism for testing whether Blanche's sworn "no knowledge" testimony holds up.

The Receipts