President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened to withdraw Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general until two Republican senators who have expressed concerns about Blanche leave office in January.
“I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office,” he said in a Thursday post to Truth Social.
The Senate Judiciary Committee postponed a vote to advance Blanche’s nomination over objections from Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. A single Republican no vote would mean the nomination fails to advance.
The pair have expressed hesitancy to support Blanche over concerns with Trump’s settlement with the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.
Responding to Trump’s post, Cornyn said on X that the president “is mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis.”
As part of the IRS lawsuit settlement, the Justice Department created a $1.776 so-called “anti-weaponization” fund. The DOJ backtracked after bipartisan criticism, but Cornyn and Tillis are pushing for the Justice Department to formalize the verbal commitment in writing.
The lawmakers are also asking that the Justice Department narrow part of the settlement that provided Trump, his family members and companies with protections against IRS audits.
Tillis told reporters on Thursday that he believed Blanche was “trying to fulfill the commitment he made in the hearing” but that someone was “in the way.”
“Todd Blanche is negotiating in good faith, but it’s clear that the approval to get this done is above his pay grade, and we just need to get to that pay grade,” Tillis said. “I don’t believe it’s the president. I got to get to finance guys.”
Cornyn expressed a similar view, telling reporters that he believed “if this were just between me and and Todd Blanche, we would have worked this out.”
“But apparently, he’s getting some pushback from higher ups at the White House,” he said. “I don’t know who, but this doesn’t need to be this hard.”
Cornyn said that the Justice Department was reluctant to change the formal settlement documents, so his team instead proposed “some additional paper” that would commit Blanche to his sworn Judiciary Committee testimony.
If the Justice Department agreed, Cornyn said his concerns would be satisfied. During his congressional testimony, Blanche testified the weaponization fund “is dead,” the audit protections do not extend beyond the parties to the lawsuit, and the settlement “doesn’t cover any government entity except the IRS.
Cornyn lost his primary election to the Trump-endorsed Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Tillis, who has clashed with Trump repeatedly, is retiring at the end of his term.
Trump took credit for the pair leaving office at the end of their terms, saying in his post that their “political careers have been ended by my action.”
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