Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has now been formally nominated for the permanent job as the nation’s top law-enforcement official. His quest for confirmation will play out over the summer, and even with a 53-47 Republican 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 new reporting for the New York Times excerpted 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, Blanche declared, “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, he fired 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........

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