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 on 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 regarding 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.”
Tillis slammed Trump’s proposal as “about as politically tone deaf a posture as I have seen in this administration.”
He argued that the move would give journalists and Democrats “gold to mine between now and the election.” The North Carolina senator also said that Trump could “roll the dice” on the Senate confirmation process once he and Cornyn are out of office, but added, “it’s all on him.”
With midterm elections less than 100 days away, it’s unclear whether Republicans will still control the Senate come January. If Democrats flip control of the Senate, they could block Blanche’s nomination.
“What I’m focused on is the main thing, and the main thing is the 1776 fund needs to go away, or they’re going to hang this yoke around our candidates’ necks, and rightly so,” Tillis said.
“I believe the only logical conclusion I can draw from this setback is that, in fact, there is somebody who wants to enable it at the right time,” he added. “That’s unacceptable.”
Cornyn voiced the same concern on Thursday.
“The fact that they’re balking at putting that in writing tells me that they were hoping to get by with this settlement agreement and his testimony and then revitalize those provisions at a later date and that’s, I don’t think, good-faith negotiations,” Cornyn said.
“I mean, it suggests to me as they are looking for an out to do something different than what Todd Blanche testified to at his hearing, and that’s a problem,” he said.
Cornyn met with Blanche later Thursday afternoon, a source familiar with the meeting told NBC News. Tillis was also part of the meeting, according to another source familiar with the matter.
A separate source told NBC News that the meeting took place at the National Republican Senatorial Committee and lasted a little over 45 minutes, ending only because Cornyn had to catch a flight back to Texas. That source said that Cornyn, Tillis and Blanche worked in a positive, collaborative manner to attempt to resolve the anti-weaponization fund issues.
As part of the IRS lawsuit settlement, the Justice Department created a $1.8 billion “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 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.”
Inside the White House, a senior administration official said that people familiar with conversations involving Cornyn accused the senator of moving the goalposts, canceling meetings and refusing to communicate with the department.
Cornyn said he and Tillis aren’t the only Republican senators who are concerned about Blanche. “We’re just on the front line because we’re in the Judiciary [Committee],” he said.
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.”
