7 min Click here to listen to this article

Share via Close extra sharing options Email Facebook X LinkedIn Threads Reddit WhatsApp Copy Link URL Copied! Print

Copy Link URL Copied!

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.

See more from the L.A. Times in Google Search. Set us as preferred

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” President Trump famously asked in his first term, angrily despairing at not having an attorney general who’d serve his interests, no holds barred, just as Trump’s reptilian mentor and fixer Cohn had done for clients from the notorious red-baiting Sen. Joe McCarthy to New York mob bosses and a young Trump.

For his second term Trump finally found his Cohn: acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, his former personal lawyer and, it’s painfully obvious, still his personal lawyer, only now at the Department of “Justice” and at taxpayers’ expense. Trump just needs to get the Republican-run Senate to confirm Blanche as the actual AG, the nation’s top law enforcement official.

Given Republican senators’ sorry record of caving to Trump’s uniformly unfit Cabinet nominees, Blanche’s confirmation unfortunately is a good bet. But it’s not a sure one.

Two factors offer some hope that the Senate could bust Blanche, in Senate-speak. Ideally, by doing so, a Senate majority of Democrats and newly backboned Republicans then could hold out to force Trump to nominate someone outside the awful mold of his second-term picks — former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz (felled by teen-sex and prostitution allegations, among others), the recently fired Pam Bondi and now Blanche.

Hope springs eternal when the rule of law is at stake.

One factor is simply Blanche’s damning record over 17 months at the Justice Department, first as its No. 2 official, deputy to then-Atty. Gen. Bondi, and as the acting attorney general since April 2. Blanche is a known commodity, and not in a good way. We know what he would do as AG because he’s doing it.

According to an ethics complaint on Monday from 101 former state and federal judges, Democrats and Republicans, and two pro-democracy groups seeking an investigation by the New York State Bar, Blanche “has engaged in conduct that violates his core responsibilities of competence, diligence, loyalty, and honesty.”

In less than three months as acting AG, he’s overseen the legally suspect “settlement” of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, a deal that both created a $1.8 billion slush fund to reward Jan. 6 insurrectionists and other Trump loyalists purportedly targeted by the Biden administration and gave Trump, his family and companies a tax amnesty erasing an estimated $100 million in potential liabilities to the Treasury. Last month, the federal judge in the IRS case reopened it, to pursue “grievous allegations” from 35 former federal judges, including Republican appointees, that the Blanche-blessed settlement was “premised on deception.”

As Bondi herself recently testified to Congress, Blanche has been responsible for the (mis)handling of the Epstein files, violating a........

© Los Angeles Times