Tonight in Your Rights: An anti-Blanche tsunami

1,200+ ex-DOJ officials oppose Todd Blanche's confirmation. Plus: One free-speech suit prevails, and another is filed.

Todd Blanche in October 2025. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

Tonight’s legal roundup kicks off with an enormous show of force against Todd Blanche’s nomination from Justice Department alumni.

Also: Trump-appointed federal judges deliver big rebukes to the MAGA agenda. One blocks a Gov. DeSantis-backed law chilling speech at Florida universities, and another quashes a Trump DOJ subpoena invading the privacy of 2020 election workers.

More than 1,200 former U.S. Department of Justice officials urged the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to reject Todd Blanche’s nomination for U.S. Attorney General.

“The culture of fear Blanche has instilled within DOJ’s workforce must end,” they wrote in a two-page letter, appended with 57 pages of signatures. “Respect for career professionals must return. Would-be job applicants need to believe the Justice Department lives up to the virtue in its name. And instead of exhibiting fealty to the president, the Attorney General must heed John Adams’ admonition that our republic remains a ‘government of laws, not of men.’”

The DOJ alumni served in Democratic and Republican administrations.

At least two of the signers formerly represented Donald Trump or his White House. They include John Dowd, who served as Trump’s lead personal attorney during the Russia investigation, and former White House attorney Ty Cobb, who later became a prominent Trump critic.

Justice Connection, an advocacy group representing Justice Department alumni, sent the letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s leaders, Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D-Il.).

Blanche is scheduled to appear before that committee for a two-day hearing starting on July 15, a little more than a week from today.

Anticipating that the senators will hear about Blanche’s “corruptions,” “abuses,” “vindictive prosecutions,” and various scandals, the letter cites “the deals designed to reward lawbreakers with taxpayer dollars; the erasure of accountability for January 6; the mishandling of the Epstein files; and the denigration of judges and repeated violations of their orders.”

But the letter takes a sharper focus on Blanche’s “degradation of DOJ’s apolitical career workforce.”

Of more than 100,000 Justice Department employees, roughly 16,000 have left during Blanche’s leadership, according to the letter.

Justice Connection’s executive director and founder Stacey Young said that Blanche “has shown time and again that his guiding star is fealty to the President, not the Constitution.”

“That fealty led to the purge of thousands of experienced career employees, a loss that will have a generational impact on the Justice Department’s ability to carry out its mission and maintain credibility with the courts and the American people,” Young said in a statement.

The letter marks the latest mobilization by the legal community during Donald Trump’s second term in ways that appear to be unprecedented, if not previously unimaginable.

• In May, 35 former federal judges signed an amicus brief that sparked an investigation into whether the Justice Department engaged in a “fraud on the court” by creating a $1.776 billion slush fund as a purported settlement of Trump v. Internal Revenue Service.

• Roughly 350 former judges signed an amicus brief supporting major law firms Trump targeted for retribution, and more than 175 former judges criticized the Supreme Court’s reliance on so-called emergency docket orders, saying that their unexplained holdings are “not binding” on lower courts.

• In dramatic demonstrations, lawyers have gathered in front of courthouses to reaffirm their oaths to the Constitution, and a group of sitting and former judges started a four-day bus tour throughout the Rust Belt today, going into communities in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan to defend an independent judiciary.

As the eye-watering number of signatures in the latest letter shows, the groundswell of opposition is growing.

The letter is worth reading in full here.

Court spikes DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act”

The Florida law backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis that restricts speech at universities is a “breathtaking assertion of power” that violates the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled on Tuesday.

“Though the government has plenty of ways to promote its own viewpoint, puppeteering every university professor in the state is not one of them,” U.S. Circuit Judge Britt Grant, a Trump appointee, wrote. “Forcing an official government line — in a college classroom of all places—is exactly the ‘pall of orthodoxy’ that the First Amendment will not tolerate.”

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s preliminary injunction blocking higher education provisions of Florida’s so-called “Individual Freedom” law, touted by its supporters as the “Stop WOKE Act.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a free-speech group, brought the lawsuit challenging the law on behalf of University of South Florida professor Adriana Novoa, student Sam Rechek and others.

Professor Novoa and Sam Rechek (Photo courtesy of Will Simpson Photography)

“As a professor, I shouldn’t have to choose between teaching to the best of my ability or facing punishment,” Novoa said in a statement. “This decision is such a relief to professors who care about their students and want them to become well-rounded and informed. It will allow me and countless other professors to teach our classes without government interference.”

As described in the majority opinion, the statute rested on the unconstitutional notion that the state government that pays a professor’s salary has total control over her speech.

“That is not a blessed union,” Grant wrote, in an impassioned opinion. “Florida’s salary-for-speech rule is a breathtaking assertion of power to ban unpopular ideas from public discourse in the very places the State’s own statutes recognize as centers of inquiry—classrooms where students are trusted to puzzle through ideas that are good and bad, easy and hard, ideally getting ever closer to the truth. This new rule also runs headlong into the Supreme Court’s repeated, if imprecise, endorsements of academic freedom. If the First Amendment offers any boundary of protection at all for public university classrooms, this statute crosses it.”

U.S. Circuit Judge Barbara Lagoa, another Trump appointee who was previously a DeSantis-appointed Florida Supreme Court Justice, wrote the dissent.

Read the opinions here.

The right to troll the VP

J.D. Vance photo embedded in a federal lawsuit.

“This petty cat account exists purr-ly to troll the administration & have more followers than J.D. Vance.”

So reads a post on the 1.9 million-follower Instagram account of Massachusetts resident Amanda McGonigle, whose “CatsOnACouch” handle lampoons the vice president’s infamous “childless cat ladies” comment. Her viral posts were apparently too hot for the U.S. Secret Service, whose agents allegedly identified her by name before blocking her from attending Vance’s public appearances.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit on Tuesday arguing that this conduct constitutes unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

In one incident in Bangor, Maine, armed Secret Service officers singled her out and said “we know where you stand,” according to the 24-page complaint.

First flagged by reporter Seamus Hughes, the complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Maine.

Clearly having fun with the assignment, the ACLU of Maine touted: “Our Latest Claw-suit to Purr-tect the First Amendment.”

Read the complaint here.

Judge quashes election-related subpoena

Finally, a federal judge in Georgia on Tuesday quashed a “staggering” subpoena stemming from Donald Trump’s ongoing attempts to discredit his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

U.S. District Judge William M. Ray II, a Trump appointee, slammed the Justice Department’s “fishing expedition” to compromise the privacy of thousands of election workers and volunteers.

In a 28-page opinion, the judge notes that the statute of limitations has lapsed on any possible crime.

“The DOJ essentially asks the Court to turn a blind eye to the DOJ’s investigation of nonspecific allegations and/or crimes which have no possibility of a conviction,” he wrote. “In essence, the DOJ’s argument is that it would be proper for a grand jury to investigate a time-barred crime, indict a defendant or defendants, and allow pretrial procedures to begin, when the conclusion is inevitable—the statute of limitations on the relevant crimes has run. Therefore, the DOJ asks the Court to use its already scarce judicial resources on what would be a dead-end prosecution. The Court is not convinced that it must ignore the clear existence of a time bar against any hypothetical crimes.”

Fulton County challenged the subpoena, warning about the “chilling effect” that disclosing the personally identifying information of thousands of election workers would have.

Ray noted that the county’s fears weren’t “hypothetical or unfounded.”

“Those who work to run elections (particularly those who volunteered their time during the COVID-19 pandemic) should be valued and are necessary for successful elections in Fulton County going forward,” he wrote. “Allowing the DOJ to obtain by subpoena the Fulton County volunteers and workers’ personal information, given its inability to prosecute anyone due to the time lapse, would be unreasonable and place a heavy burden on Fulton County that cannot be ignored.”

Read the order here.

Reminder: The sentencing of former Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan is scheduled to take place at 11:30 a.m. Central Time on Wednesday. Stay tuned to All Rise News for live coverage from the courtroom.