Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has now been formally nominated for the permanent job as the nation’s top law enforcement official. His quest for confirmation will play out over the summer and, even with a 53-47 Republican advantage in the Senate, it looks like a toss-up.
Hanging over Blanche’s confirmation hearings are damaging new revelations about the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. No Senator will be able to cast a vote for him without either embracing or forgiving his cynical politicization of the Epstein matter.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, in new reporting for the New York Times excerpted from their forthcoming book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” offer astonishing insights into the dishonesty and incompetency of the leaders overseeing the bungled Epstein response. And Blanche stands inextricably at the center of it all.
Most fundamentally, Haberman and Swan expose that Blanche and Justice Department leadership handled the Epstein case as a matter of politics, not prosecution. Their reporting flatly discredits Blanche’s self-congratulatory refrain that, under his watch, the Justice Department stands above and beyond political concerns. And when asked in December 2025 if political motivations influenced redactions from the Epstein files, he fired back, “Absolutely, positively not.”
Turns out, that was bullshit.
In fact, Haberman and Swan report in detail how key decisions around the Epstein files were made by Blanche and other DOJ leaders who worked intensively with (and at times took direction from) top White House officials. Unsurprisingly for a Justice Department that now hangs on its headquarters a massive banner of Donald Trump’s glowering face, DOJ’s priority was not to pursue criminals, to protect victims, or to inform the public, but to minimize political damage to the President and his administration.
The panic level around the unfolding public relations crisis was so intense that Blanche reportedly met with White House brass in the Situation Room – the same ultra-secure facility used during national security crucibles from the Cuban Missile Crisis to 9/11 to Covid. The decisionmaking that came out of those meetings was questionable, at best. At times, Blanche vouched for desperate measures intended to mitigate individual brushfires, only to accelerate the larger conflagration.
For example, as public confidence collapsed around DOJ’s vexing and often self-contradictory messaging, Blanche devised an underhanded ploy to create an illusion of transparency. Haberman and Swan report that he suggested prosecutors could formally ask judges to unseal secret grand jury records relating to the investigations of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. But, as Blanche understood based on his own prosecutorial experience, the judges likely would deny the motions (which they all eventually did). And even if by some fluke a judge granted DOJ’s disingenuous request, Blanche knew the grand jury records would contain nothing new or interesting. He believed it would be a win-win; either way, Justice Department leaders would look like they tried, and nothing damaging would be revealed.
When that gambit satisfied precisely nobody, Blanche tried something even more desperate. He flew to Florida and interviewed Maxwell face-to-face, with the expectation that the convicted child sex trafficker – who actively solicited a presidential pardon – would clear Trump of wrongdoing. Haberman and Swan report that Vice President J.D. Vance (who “appeared panicked” over the right-wing response to the Epstein mess) initially proposed that carnival barker Tucker Carlson do the dirty work, meet with Maxwell behind bars, and tell his audiencethat all was well. The plan fell through, and Blanche emerged as Carlson’s understudy — not exactly a sparkling resume item for an aspiring Attorney General.
Blanche’s ensuing interview with Maxwell was a fiasco. Despite the overwhelming evidence that led to her conviction by a trial jury, Maxwell claimed she was innocent; that she wasn’t even entirely sure Epstein himself had committed any crime; and that Trump – who was “very cordial and very kind” and should be admired for his “extraordinary achievement” – had done nothing wrong. (Hey, Mr. President, don’t forget about that pardon!)
When Blanche was asked by Kaitlan Collins on CNN if he found Maxwell credible, he stammered, “I, it’s, it’s an impossible question to answer… what I did is I gave her that opportunity to speak, it was recorded, my questions were there, and whether, whether her answers were credible or truthful, there’s a lot of information out there about, about Mr. Epstein, about her, and whether what she said is completely wrong, or completely right, or a little of both…” Despite (or perhaps because of) her obviously bogus account, Maxwell was rewarded days later with a transfer to a minimum security federal prison in Texas.
As the scandal deepened, Blanche became the primary face of DOJ on the Epstein matter. He gave countless interviews and press conferences while then-AG Pam Bondi mostly receded into the background. And in her May 29 testimony to the House Oversight Committee, Bondi at once heaped praise on her former Deputy (“highly ethical” and “an incredible Acting Attorney General”) while also putting him in a political vise.
Bondi testified that she “delegated” oversight of the Epstein case to Blanche and “relied on” him. “He was leading the Epstein matter and the release of everything from the beginning,” the former AG told the panel. At times, Bondi implied, she didn’t even know what her own Justice Department was doing.he professed ignorance, for example, on the reason behind Maxwell’s prison transfer after the in-person meeting with Blanche: “I read about it in the newspaper, or online, after it happened. I had nothing to do with that.”
Intentionally or not, Bondi left Blanche in a terrible spot. And now that we’ve seen the inner workings of DOJ’s coordination with White House officials laid bare, we know that Blanche’s insistent claims of pure prosecutorial independence are just so much bunk.
The Justice Department’s politicization of the matter has resonated especially powerfully with Epstein’s victims, 19 of whom publicly opposed Blanche’s nomination as AG in light of Haberman and Swan’s reporting. They sharply criticized Blanche’s handling of the Epstein files’ release “as a reputational problem, rather than an opportunity to pursue investigative leads and try to figure out what actually happened.”
It remains to be seen how opposition from victims will play with Senate Republicans, already weary of the political damage inflicted by the never-ending Epstein saga. Whether lawmakers actually care about the child sex trafficking ring that victimized countless women and girls, they certainly understand the need to look like they care. And as he careens towards confirmation hearings, Blanche now owns the Epstein matter – all of it, with nowhere to run.
