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Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has now been formallynominatedfor the permanent job as the nation’s top law-enforcement official. His quest for confirmation will play out over the summer, and even with a53-47Republican 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 newreportingfor the New YorkTimesexcerpted 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. At his confirmation hearing for the deputy-AG position, for example, Blanchedeclared, “Politics would play no role in my decisions as deputy attorney general.” And when asked in December 2025 if political motivations influenced redactions from the Epstein files, hefired 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 massivebannerof Donald Trump’s glowering face, the 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 ultrasecure facility used during national-security crucibles from theCuban Missile Crisisto9/11toCOVID. The decision-making 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 the DoJ’s vexing and often self-contradictory messaging, Blanche devised an underhanded ploy to create an illusion of transparency. Haberman and Swanreportthat 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 eventuallydid). And even if by some fluke a judge granted the 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 activelysoliciteda 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 audience that all was well. The plan fell through, and Blanche emerged as Carlson’s understudy — not exactly a sparkling résumé item for an aspiring attorney general.
Blanche’s ensuinginterview with Maxwellwas a fiasco. Despite the overwhelming evidence that led to her conviction by a trial jury, Maxwellclaimedshe 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 wasasked by Kaitlan Collins on CNNif 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 atransferto a minimum-security federal prison in Texas.
As the scandal deepened, Blanche became the primary face of the DoJ on the Epstein matter. He gave countlessinterviewsandpress conferenceswhile then-AG Pam Bondi mostlyrecededinto the background. And in her May 29testimonyto the House Oversight Committee, Bondi at once heaped praise on her former deputy (calling him “highly ethical” and “an incredible acting attorney general”) while also putting him in a political vise.
Bonditestifiedthat 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. She 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.”
