Blanche’s Nomination Just Became a Referendum on Who Gets Immunity

I’ve spent enough years in newsrooms and enough years in uniform to know the difference between a principled objection and political theater. What’s happening right now with Todd Blanche’s nomination for attorney general reads like the former, and that alone should make you pay attention.

Here’s the setup. President Trump nominated his former personal defense attorney, Todd Blanche, to run the Justice Department. That alone wasn’t the problem — plenty of presidents have nominated loyalists to DOJ leadership, and plenty of those nominees have gone on to serve with independence once confirmed. The problem is what came bundled with the nomination: a Justice Department settlement ending Trump’s lawsuit over his leaked IRS tax returns, one that reportedly creates a nearly $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. That fund would compensate people who claim they were unfairly targeted by the federal government — a category that, as written, could include defendants charged in the January 6 Capitol riot. Layered on top of that is a sweeping immunity arrangement shielding Trump, his family, and his businesses from audits of past tax returns.

Two Republican senators — John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — are the ones holding up the confirmation, and neither is a Trump antagonist by any reasonable read of their voting records. That’s precisely why this matters. When members of the president’s own party start asking who actually qualifies as “unfairly targeted” and whether that definition just happens to open the door for people charged with storming the Capitol, that’s not partisan resistance. That’s a fiscal and legal accountability question, and it deserves an answer regardless of who’s asking it.

Trump’s response was telling in its own way. Rather than dig in, he floated pulling Blanche’s nomination temporarily, keeping him on as acting attorney general, and renominating him “after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.” Set aside how you feel about Trump personally — that’s not a rebuttal to the substance of the objection. That’s a plan to wait out the specific senators raising it. If the anti-weaponization fund and the audit-immunity terms are as defensible as the administration suggests, outlasting two critics shouldn’t be necessary.

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying Blanche is unfit for the job because of who he used to represent. Plenty of capable attorneys general have come out of politically adjacent legal work. And I’m not saying the underlying IRS leak — Trump’s tax returns getting out to the public in the first place — didn’t deserve some kind of legal resolution. It did. What I am saying is that the specific mechanism of that resolution, a fund that could functionally reimburse people facing charges tied to an attack on the Capitol, is the kind of policy detail that shouldn’t get waved through because it’s attached to a nomination fight people want to end quickly.

This is where UNJ’s lane in this conversation is different from what you’ll get from either cable network. CNN’s framing will likely center this as further evidence of Trump corruption, full stop, no complexity. Fox’s framing will likely minimize it as Democrat-adjacent obstruction dressed up in Republican clothing, or ignore the specifics of the fund altogether. Neither framing sits with the actual fact pattern: Republican senators, not Democrats, are the ones asking the hard question here, and the question is about a specific dollar figure and a specific category of potential beneficiaries, not vague vibes about weaponization.

If you’re a reader who’s tired of the binary — tired of every story getting sorted into “defend the president” or “resist the president” before the facts are even settled — this is a useful test case. Ask what you’d want to know if this were a governor of either party doing the exact same thing: creating a large compensation fund, tied to a legal settlement, tied to a Cabinet nomination, where the class of eligible recipients happens to include people charged in a specific and politically loaded event. You’d want transparency about who qualifies, how the fund is administered, and whether the timing is coincidental. Those are fair questions no matter whose name is on the door.

Cornyn and Tillis will face plenty of pressure to fold. Whether they do will tell you something real about how much independent oversight is actually left in a Senate that’s spent the better part of a decade being described as a rubber stamp for whoever holds the White House. I’ll be watching the confirmation vote, not the noise around it, and I’d encourage you to do the same.