At 4 a.m. on a Saturday morning, with one Republican senator absent and two others voting no, the United States Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as Attorney General of the United States by a vote of 50-49. The man who sat at the defense table while 34 felony counts were read aloud against Donald Trump now sits behind the desk that runs the Department of Justice.
Every federal prosecutor in America just got a new boss. And he remembers what it looks like from the other side of the courtroom.
Blanche's path to the big chair was anything but smooth. President Trump first tapped him in June after removing Pam Bondi from the role in April. The Senate Judiciary Committee advanced his nomination on a party-line vote, and the full confirmation fight came down to a knife's edge. Republicans most unreliable Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska broke ranks to vote against him, joining every single Democrat. With Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky absent for the vote, the math left zero margin for error.
The breakthrough came Friday when Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana announced he'd change his no vote to a yes. That locked in the 50th vote. But Blanche had to clear one more hurdle first — the $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund that had become a flashpoint during his confirmation hearings. Blanche had initially backed the fund, created under a May settlement agreement, then reversed course and rescinded the directive, which was one of Cassidy's stipulations for changing his vote. During testimony, Blanche declared the fund "dead." GOP Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina reached a separate agreement with DOJ that helped bring wavering Republicans on board.
Blanche posted that he was "deeply honored by the trust and confidence President Trump has placed in me to lead the Department of Justice" after the Senate confirmed him.
The left is already framing this as the fox guarding the henhouse. Which is an interesting objection coming from the people who had no problem with the henhouse prosecuting the fox on 34 counts of business record violations tied to a $130,000 payment — and then calling it justice. Blanche defended Trump through that entire circus. He watched the machinery of federal prosecution up close, and now he's the one deciding how it runs.
The broader context makes this confirmation matter beyond the personnel change. President Trump has also filed a $10 billion civil lawsuit against the IRS. The DOJ released over 2 million files from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Former special counsel Jack Smith is gone. The department that spent years building cases against Donald Trump is now being led by the man who sat next to him while they did it.
The confirmation caps weeks of uncertainty. The uncertainty is over. What comes next is the part that makes Washington nervous.
