Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J.
Yesterday afternoon, President Donald J. Trump officially nominated acting attorney general Todd Blanche to become the attorney general of the United States.
Before going to the Department of Justice, Blanche was Trump’s personal attorney. He led Trump’s criminal defense team in the case of falsifying records to cover up hush-money payments to adult film actress Stormy Daniels, as well as his defense against the two cases brought by special counsel Jack Smith: the one indicting him for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the one indicting him for retaining classified documents after leaving office.
Since he took over for former attorney general Pam Bondi, Blanche has openly flouted the law in order to do Trump’s bidding. He secured indictments against people Trump perceives to be enemies, including former FBI director James Comey for posting on Instagram a picture of seashells arranged to form the number “8647.”
He backed the deal Trump made with the Department of Justice to establish a $1.776 billion slush fund to pay off those convicted of committing crimes surrounding Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including storming the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Blanche put his name to the second half of that deal that seems to be being eclipsed by the slush fund: an agreement between Trump and the Department of Justice promising to drop any pending claims against Trump, his oldest sons, or the Trump Organization for past illegalities in tax returns, and promising not to conduct audits of Trump’s tax returns.
In the 1920s, gangster Al Capone kept his hands clean of direct evidence of the crimes he committed. The federal government finally took him down by convicting him of federal income tax evasion.
Trump’s nomination of Blanche directly challenges Republican senators to collude with him to flout the will of rank-and-file Republicans and break the law. In November 2025 the Senate voted unanimously to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. This law required the Department of Justice to release all the files compiled by the FBI in its investigation of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein no later than December 19, 2025.
The Department of Justice has ignored that law. To date, it has released about half the files. Many of those it has released are heavily redacted although the law expressly prohibits such redactions. Instead, the Department of Justice released previously unknown names of Epstein survivors.
Mike Spector and Lindo So of Reuters reported yesterday that those survivors are now under threat from Trump supporters. “She’ll be unalived,” someone wrote under a news report of an accuser demanding the release of the files. “She really should’ve stayed quiet. RIP.”
In her testimony before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Bondi told members of Congress that Blanche “was in charge of the process and the entire release of the Epstein files.” Bondi also said that she had “nothing to do with” the transfer of Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, a convicted sex offender, from prison to a minimum security camp. As Annie Grayer, M.J. Lee, Paula Reid, and Marshall Cohen of CNN reported, that transfer happened just after Blanche interviewed Maxwell for nine hours.
In that interview, Maxwell said nothing that would tie Trump to Epstein’s crimes, language Trump loyalists used to push back against the story reported just weeks before by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo in the Wall Street Journal that what appears to be Trump’s signature is at the bottom of a birthday card to Epstein suggesting the two shared a “wonderful secret.” The words were written over a drawing of a naked girl.
MAGA Republicans supported Trump in 2024 because he promised to release the Epstein files, and Senate Republicans responded to their anger that the Trump administration was hiding those files by voting unanimously to require—not request—their release. Now Trump is demanding they abandon those voters to put the man behind that cover-up into office as the top law enforcement officer in the country.
As David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo explained today, if Republican senators confirm Blanche, they will be rubber-stamping Trump’s perversion of the Department of Justice and encouraging it to continue, blessing “wide-ranging and extreme” corruption. “No accountability, no roadblocks, no pumping the brakes.”
That rubber stamp on criminality would fall just as the corruption of the administration has become too obvious to pretend doesn’t exist.
New stories out today examine new aspects of that corruption.
Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, and Alex Mierjeski of ProPublica reported that an Indian billionaire appears to have gotten Trump to ease sanctions against his family’s energy empire by investing $100 million in a Texas start-up company in which Donald Trump Jr. is an investor.
Upon the Ambani family’s investment in America First Refining, the start-up secured beneficial U.S. policies for which it had been lobbying. The journalists report that longstanding problems with the company make it unlikely that the refinery America First has promised will ever get built, especially at a time when refineries are expensive and unprofitable.
The journalists note that it has become “a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.” Last December, looking only at publicly disclosed investments—the one the journalists uncovered today was secret—Forbes estimated that Don Jr.’s net worth had jumped from about $50 million to about $300 million since the 2024 election.
In Mother Jones today, scholar of corruption Casey Michel explored the many connections between Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Middle East billionaires who have invested billions in his investment fund Affinity Partners, essentially buying access to the president and U.S. policymaking even as the inexperienced Kushner represents the U.S. in sensitive negotiations in the region.
Kushner’s plans include a deal for a $1.6 billion tourist resort in Albania along a stretch of coastline and a pristine island protected as a critical area of biodiversity. Critics claim Prime Minister Edi Rama backed the Affinity Partners project to curry favor with the Trump administration. Protesters have taken to the streets in Albania’s capital, Tirana, chanting “Albania is not for sale!” and calling for Rama’s resignation.
White House press spokesperson Anna Kelly told Mithil Aggarwal, Raf Sanchez, and Mo Abbas of NBC News that Kushner is a “volunteer” for the government and that his business activities “have nothing to do with the President or the administration.” Asked if Rama’s government had backed the project to gain favor with Trump, she said: “This is the same, tired narrative that Democrats have pushed against President Trump, his family, and his administration for a decade.”
An investigation by Tom Bergin, Michelle Conlin, Koh Gui Qing, and Tom Wilson of Reuters today shows that the Trump family has made at least $2.3 billion in their crypto currency licensing adventures since Trump began his second term. It also shows that more than a million people who invested in their enterprises have suffered at least $2.3 billion in losses.
The journalists report that the investors they interviewed believed that Trump’s position as president and “what they perceived as his business acumen” guaranteed they would make money. “Some said they still hold on to the hope that Trump will make things right. Others expressed regret, anger and embarrassment.”
Trump and MAGA Republicans celebrated the model of governance used by prime minister of Hungary Viktor Orbán during his 16 years in power, calling for the U.S. government to mimic his rejection of immigration, undermining of the rule of law, and destruction of liberal democracy in favor of what Orbán called “illiberal democracy” or “Christian democracy.”
After voters threw out Orbán and his party with a supermajority that would empower the country’s new leaders to investigate their predecessors, the extraordinary corruption is coming to light. Marton Dunai of the Financial Times reported today that tracking the financial transactions of the Orbán government has shown that it siphoned off at least 160 billion euros, equivalent to about $185 billion dollars, from European Union funds, with the corruption peaking in Orbán’s last year in office as loyalists worked to grab what they could as Orbán’s power was crumbling.
But, as Andrew Higgins and Lili Rutai reported in the New York Times just before the election that swept Orbán and his party out of power, many Orbán loyalists jumped ship. Although they risked government persecution from Orbán should he win reelection, they took the gamble that the future belonged not to him but to his opponents.
Trump appears to be trying to prevent such defections in the ranks of the Republican senators by forcing them to confirm Blanche, thus rubber-stamping his perversion of the rule of law and joining him in his utter disregard of the demand of Republican voters for the release of the Epstein files.
There may well be an effort to downplay the Blanche confirmation process, but make no mistake: it is a very big deal indeed.
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