Appearing Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” newly confirmed Attorney General Todd Blanche refused to pledge independence from Donald Trump’s White House, and he insisted that the president would never ask him to do anything illegal or unethical.
Blanche’s second statement is more concerning than the first, and it’s important to understand why.
His first statement came after host Kristen Welker asked, “Can you pledge that the Justice Department will always act independently of the White House?”
Blanche replied: “Well, there’s a big difference between saying we will always do our job and investigate any case and act independently of the White House — no, I’m not going to pledge that. And no attorney general should ever pledge that.”
He added:
If I were to pledge I will be independent of the White House, what that means is that if President Trump says, “I want the Department of Justice to go after every violent criminal in this country,” which is what he has said, what you’re saying to me is I should say, “No, sir; not going to do it.” So I will act with integrity. Our prosecutors will act with integrity. We will prosecute without fear or any sort of favor. And that’s exactly what we’ve been doing. And that’s what every Department of Justice should do.
That’s a fine answer in theory. It reflects the modern Republican view of the “unitary executive,” a theory predating Trump’s presidency that rejects the notion of executive branch actors working independently of the president. It stands in contrast to the post-Watergate norm of DOJ independence, a norm that might lead people to assume today that such independence is implicit in the attorney general’s job, as opposed to something that each administration makes policy choices about to at least some degree.
What Blanche said about prosecuting violent crime, for example, is not controversial. DOJ policies change under new administrations. Former President Joe Biden, for example, campaigned against the death penalty. It’s not a coincidence, nor would any reasonable person deem it improper on “independence” grounds, that his attorney general, Merrick Garland, implemented some like-minded policies regarding the use of capital punishment.
Lack of complete independence is therefore not necessarily a problem per se. Rather, it becomes a problem when the president wants to use the DOJ as an illegal tool of his personal whims to exact vengeance.
That’s to say, it’s a problem under Trump.
And it was a known issue for Blanche prior to his recent confirmation, because he had already shown his willingness to use the department to go after the president’s critics and political opponents while he has been at or near the top of DOJ leadership throughout Trump’s second term.
Against that backdrop, Welker’s follow-up question produced the more worrisome part of Blanche’s remarks in this exchange. She asked, “Well, I guess, big picture: If the president asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?”
There was an easy, one-word answer that Blanche could have given here: No.
Instead, he replied:
The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will. And no, I swore to the Constitution of the United States, like every Cabinet secretary has done and like every attorney general before me has done. And so this narrative that’s mostly pushed by the left and pushed by the media that the president’s going to pull me aside and ask me to do something illegal is completely a false narrative, not true, will not happen and hasn’t happened.
The attorney general’s immediate default was not to legal ethics or the law but to the president’s infallibility. While it is heartening at first glance to see him go on to cite his constitutional oath, one wonders what he thinks the Constitution requires of him under such an expansive theory of presidential power.
With all of that said, when it comes to what Blanche called the “false narrative” that the president is “going to pull me aside and ask me to do something illegal,” the bigger issue may be that Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer, who rode the president’s coattails to the top of federal law enforcement, knows what to do without having to be asked.
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The post Blanche disclaiming independence from Trump isn’t the issue here appeared first on MS NOW.
