(CNN) — There are basically two potential roadblocks to Todd Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general: GOP Sens. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas.
Either Republican, who’s not running for reelection in the fall, could block it by voting against him in the narrowly divided Senate Judiciary Committee.
More than 400 pages of newly released written responses from Blanche to senators suggest he’s more concerned about Cornyn than Tillis.
But he’s not giving either man everything they want just yet.
One of the more telling sections of the extensive paperwork comes when Blanche is asked about a series of ugly comments from Mike Davis, a former Republican staffer on the committee who reportedly helped Blanche prepare for his testimony.
While Blanche repeatedly responds by saying Davis’ words aren’t his own, he more explicitly rejects one Davis comment: his criticism of Cornyn.
When Sen. Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the committee, asks if he agrees with Davis’ statement from May that the Texas Republican was “out-of-touch,” Blanche responds flatly: “No.”
The document does not include any questions submitted by Cornyn, who was defeated by a Trump-backed primary challenger in a May runoff. But it does include a number of responses relevant to Cornyn’s chief concern.
That would be the highly controversial settlement between President Donald Trump’s lawyers and the government he leads, which created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund and gave Trump, his family or businesses immunity from past tax issues. The settlement was purportedly to resolve a Trump lawsuit against the IRS, but a judge recently ruled the entire gambit amounted to an attempt to “manipulate the judicial process.”
Blanche said in his testimony last week that the fund, which could have given money to violent defendants from the Capitol attack, was “dead.” He also entertained ways to ensure it’s not resurrected, which Cornyn said he needs to see before voting to confirm him.
But Blanche in his written responses confirms that Trump’s immunity deal is still in effect. When asked if it was, he responds, “Yes.”
When asked if he would withdraw the immunity deal, Blanche doesn’t commit to doing so. He instead says it would be “inappropriate for me to comment on internal deliberations that may or may not have occurred.”
Cornyn told Politico on Monday that he was still working with the administration to get the settlement amended to address both the “anti-weaponization” fund and the immunity deal.
Blanche’s noncommittal response was a familiar one, it turns out. In the written responses, he says more than 160 times that it would be “inappropriate for me” to respond directly to a question or to do something a senator asked. He often cites a desire not to reveal internal communications.
And one of the senators he does that with repeatedly? Tillis.
Despite the North Carolina Republican’s concerns with the nomination, Blanche gives him that response more than 20 times.
That includes Tillis’ request for information about how the Justice Department justified the $1.776 billion amount from the settlement, how it calculated its risk if Trump’s lawsuit went to trial, and who inside the department was responsible for creating the fund.
Blanche also declines to rule out bringing back the “anti-weaponization” fund if Trump requested it.
Tillis asks him: “If the President directs you to reverse your decision and move forward with the Fund, will you move forward?” Blanche responds that it would be “inappropriate for me to comment on hypothetical communications.”
Blanche also seems to run afoul of another of Tillis’ early concerns: DOJ’s independence from the presidency. The DOJ has repeatedly investigated Trump’s foes, often based on flimsy evidence and sometimes after he explicitly called for the investigations — a major break with DOJ norms.
In a CNN interview last month, Tillis said he was positively predisposed toward Blanche. But he quickly added that “if there’s even a whiff of a lack of independence, then that could influence my vote.”
Blanche has certainly seemed to provide that whiff.
In his hearing last week, he repeatedly responded to questions about DOJ independence by noting that the department is part of the executive branch — the implication being that it’s not totally independent of the president.
But Trump’s nominee arguably goes further in his written responses.
Sen. Chris Coons asked him whether he stood by a statement he made on Steve Bannon’s podcast in April that “there’s this model out there that somehow the Department of Justice is independent from the president of the United States. That is not true.”
Responding to the Delaware Democrat, Blanche responded simply: “Yes.”’
At another point, though, he clarifies that he does not consider himself Trump’s lawyer, a position Blanche did hold previously. At last week’s hearing, he briefly said, “I’m his lawyer,” before seeming to correct himself and saying he “was his lawyer.”
There is little evidence that independence remains a concern for Tillis.
The retiring senator has generally said nice things about Blanche. After last week’s confirmation hearing, he demanded that Blanche meet with Jeffrey Epstein survivors, which Blanche quickly did.
Tillis praised him for taking the meeting, even though some of the survivors criticized his comments during that sitdown.
As of Tuesday, more than two dozen survivors wrote to both Cornyn and Tillis urging them to reject Blanche’s nomination.
Whether Cornyn and Tillis have the desire to truly fight for their demands — and hold a hard line — remains to be seen.
The-CNN-Wire
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