Saturday Rewind: Grilling Blanche
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, one of Todd Blanche's most effective questioners, dove deep into a brutal ruling against him.
Two days before Todd Blanche’s confirmation hearing, a federal judge issued a blistering ruling scorching his actions concerning the so-called settlement in Trump v. Internal Revenue Service.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams ordered her clerk to send a copy of her order to the State Bar of New York, suggesting that the disciplinary authorities there may want to learn about Blanche’s conduct.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), a former U.S. Attorney, immediately took notice and provided historical perspective.
“It's a hell of a decision in a matter that's been a hell of a saga for the Department of Justice,” Whitehouse told All Rise News in a video interview. “Our research is that the Department of Justice has never been accused of engaging in a fraud upon a federal court.”
In a roughly 20-minute interview, Whitehouse shared his thoughts and analysis in the lead-up to the confirmation hearing. He ultimately pressed Blanche to provide the Justice Department’s internal communications with Trump to the Committee. (Refusing to commit to do so, Blanche invited Whitehouse to place a request.) Whitehouse pointedly asked Blanche: “How long do you plan to put up with that Kash Patel character?”
Citing Patel’s “airplane jaunts,” Whitehouse continued: “Are you confident that he’s not drinking on the job? Are you sure that none of his travel is a pretext for vacation activities like snorkling, Olympics, and visiting girlfriends? Are you sure that he knows what he’s doing? Do you vouch for him? Are you willing to look into whether he lied to this Committee?”
After Blanche bristled at what he called the “extraordinarily obnoxious question,” Whitehouse countered: “Great, you get to own that.”
Perhaps most significantly, Whitehouse was one of the few senators on the Judiciary Committee providing a wide-angle picture of the defeats and dysfunction inside the Justice Department.
His staff prepared camera-ready graphics with montages of the judges’ most blistering rulings toward his prosecutors.
“If you look at the MAGA Department of Justice, over and over again, U.S. attorneys are being sanctioned and disciplined,” Whitehouse noted in the interview. “Cases are being dismissed for prosecutorial misconduct. Prosecutors are being called out and lawyers are being called out for offering arguments that are ‘pretexts,’ which is a loaded word in judiciary land. Somebody says to a government lawyer — who enjoys the presumption of regularity — that he's making an argument in ‘bad faith’ or as a ‘pretext’: Them's fighting words, and that usually gets disciplinary attention. And it's happening over and over and over and over again. There's been an absolute avalanche of judicial criticism of this MAGA Department of Justice from judges appointed by every president.”
In other videos this week:
A Florida professor and her attorney discuss their victory for academic freedom, blocking Gov. Ron DeSantis’s so-called “Stop WOKE Act.”
Immigration expert Andrea R. Flores reacts to ICE agents shooting men to death in Maine and Texas.
Attorney Brendan Ballou discusses his latest lawsuit to block the $110 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. merger and testimony by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) that roasted Blanche for attending David Ellison’s dinner honoring Trump while he was seeking federal approval for the deal.
In a solo video, I break down why a potential probe that Blanche signaled against former Special Counsel Jack Smith is based on a false premise.
You can watch my interview with Whitehouse in full on Legal AF’s All Rise News playlist, and paid subscribers can watch all of these videos ad-free below.
