Todd Blanche, the sitting deputy and acting attorney general, faced nearly six hours of questioning on July 15, 2026, in his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing to become the 88th Attorney General of the United States. Chairman Chuck Grassley opened with a bombshell: newly obtained emails show that special counsel Jack Smith’s team bypassed a legally required “filter team” and directly accessed the text-message content of 44 members of Congress, including senators on the committee, just 20 seconds after being told the records were ready. Democrats, led by Ranking Member Dick Durbin, pressed Blanche on the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, his refusal to commit to a firm timeline for meeting with Epstein survivors seated in the room, the transfer of Ghislaine Maxwell to a lower-security prison camp after he personally interviewed her, and a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” he created — and now calls “dead” — that a federal judge recently found was born from a “collusive” lawsuit settlement with President Trump. Senators Cory Booker and Adam Schiff delivered some of the hearing’s sharpest exchanges, accusing Blanche of conflicts of interest tied to a Trump family IRS tax settlement he signed and a Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger his department cleared weeks after he attended a dinner hosted by the deal’s architect. Republicans, including Ted Cruz, Katie Britt, and Marsha Blackburn, countered with a run of statistics on falling murder rates, fentanyl seizures, and fraud takedowns, framing Blanche’s tenure as a law-and-order turnaround from what they called the politicized Biden-era Justice Department. No vote was taken; the committee reconvenes for a business meeting and an outside witness panel the following morning. Assistance from Claude AI.
Participants
Presiding / Republican Members
- Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa — Chairman
- Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas
- Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah (also presided during part of the hearing)
- Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas
- Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C.
- Sen. John Kennedy, R-La.
- Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo.
- Sen. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.
- Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo.
- Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala.
- Sen. Ashley Moody, R-Fla. (introduced the nominee)
- Sen. Michael D. Crapo, R-Idaho
Democratic Members
- Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill. — Ranking Member
- Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I.
- Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.
- Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del.
- Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.
- Sen. Mazie K. Hirono, D-Hawaii
- Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.
- Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif.
- Sen. Peter Welch, D-Vt.
- Sen. Adam B. Schiff, D-Calif.
Witness
- Todd Blanche — Acting Attorney General and nominee to be Attorney General of the United States (former Deputy Attorney General; formerly personal criminal defense attorney to President Trump)
Notable individuals referenced or present in the audience
- Epstein survivors, including several who submitted letters opposing the nomination and one, Jona Affholder, whose account of coerced abortion by a former partner was raised by Sen. Britt
- The nominee’s wife, Christine, children Sydney and Justin, and granddaughter Blaine
A Hearing Held in the Shadow of Loss
The hearing opened on a somber note. Chairman Grassley and Ranking Member Durbin both paid tribute to the committee’s former chairman, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who had recently died; his seat at the dais sat empty throughout the day. Durbin recalled sparring with Graham “since he joined the Senate in 2003” and called him “a trusted friend,” while Grassley noted the committee was “honoring him with this memorial today.”
Sen. Moody, introducing Blanche as his home-state senator (Blanche relocated to Florida, making him, as she put it, “my constituent, as the newest senator from the great state of Florida”), walked through his biography: he began at the Department of Justice as a paralegal, worked nights to get through law school, and spent roughly a decade as a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, earning commendations from the FBI, DEA, ATF and NYPD before ever meeting Donald Trump.
Opening Statements: A Study in Contrasts
Grassley used his opening remarks to tout DOJ statistics under Blanche’s leadership — the lowest U.S. murder rate since 1900, violent-crime arrests up 184 percent, more than 6,300 fentanyl arrests and 44,000 illegal firearms seized — and pre-emptively dismissed an opposition letter from former DOJ employees as coordinated by “partisan activists,” naming former Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and several Jack Smith deputies among the signers.
Durbin countered with a list of grievances: the creation of the anti-weaponization fund; the Epstein files “cover-up”; the removal of career prosecutors, including the pardon attorney fired after declining to restore gun rights to Mel Gibson; the crypto-enforcement unit’s dismantling while Trump’s family crypto business brought in $1.4 billion in 2025; and Blanche’s own past statement that the Justice Department was “at war with the federal judiciary.” Durbin closed by entering six letters from Epstein survivors opposing the nomination and a letter from more than 1,200 former DOJ employees into the record.
In his own opening statement, Blanche described his path from paralegal to prosecutor to deputy and acting attorney general as “the American Dream,” cited a roughly 20 percent nationwide drop in murders, and pledged, “We are keeping America safe. And we are just getting started.”
The Jack Smith Revelations: Congressional Text Messages
The hearing’s most significant new disclosure came from Grassley, who described records showing that on August 21, 2023, the National Archives’ then-general counsel told Smith deputy Thomas Windom that responsive text-message records were ready — and that Windom’s team downloaded them just 20 seconds later, without routing them through the legally required filter team meant to screen out privileged material. Grassley said DOJ has confirmed in writing that “the special counsel’s investigative team apparently bypassed the filter team and directly accessed these text messages,” which included communications with senators on the Judiciary Committee, protected under the Constitution’s speech-and-debate clause.
Sen. Mike Lee elaborated that the content — not just metadata — of texts from 44 members of Congress, including six on the Judiciary Committee, had been accessed “without notice in a baseless fishing expedition.” Sen. Ted Cruz walked Blanche through a fact pattern confirming that 20 percent of Senate Republicans, including Cruz himself, FBI Director Kash Patel and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, had their cell phone data obtained under the Biden-era Operation Arctic Frost investigation, which Cruz said involved nearly 200 subpoenas targeting more than 400 Republican-aligned groups and individuals.
Sen. Josh Hawley read into the record sworn testimony in which Smith denied his team had obtained the content of text messages — testimony Hawley called flatly contradicted by the new emails. “Have you thought about investigating this guy for perjury?” Hawley asked. Blanche responded, “We take testimony in front of this body very seriously. Yes,” and later added, “Yes, Senator,” when asked whether he hoped to see Smith prosecuted.
Sen. Whitehouse pushed back sharply on the framing of the hearing’s tone toward oversight generally, telling Blanche that outstanding committee questions and Freedom of Information Act requests “have not been informative. They have been blow-offs.”
The Epstein Files: Redactions, Survivors, and the Maxwell Meeting
Blanche defended the department’s release of nearly three million pages of Epstein-related records under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, saying DOJ reviewed more than six million pages, intentionally over-collected material, and made mistakes in roughly 1 percent of redactions that were corrected “within minutes” of being flagged. “We have been extraordinarily transparent,” he said, contrasting the release with what he characterized as four years of Biden-administration silence on Epstein.
Durbin pressed Blanche, under oath, to commit to meeting personally with 10 Epstein survivors in the hearing room within 30 days. Blanche repeatedly avoided a firm yes-or-no answer, citing legal restrictions on contacting represented parties and noting a staff member who leads DOJ’s human-trafficking task force was available “today” to meet them. “I think you ought to be in the room,” Durbin told him. Sen. Booker later called Blanche’s stated reluctance to meet survivors directly “utter nonsense” given that a represented client can waive counsel’s presence, and noted that while Blanche would not commit to a survivor meeting, he had personally interviewed convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell for two days.
Booker pressed on the aftermath of that interview: Maxwell was transferred from a low-security federal institution to a minimum-security prison camp roughly a week later. Blanche said the move followed threats against her but was cut off before completing his explanation; he denied that the interview produced any new charges or that he discussed a pardon, clemency, or her transfer with her legal team. Sen. Blumenthal separately asked Blanche to apologize to survivors on the record; Blanche said, “I very much… any mistake that we made, should not have been made,” and, “I am sorry.”
A federal judge in Florida, examining a separate matter, found that Blanche’s public characterization of a related settlement was “at best misleading and at worst disingenuous” and referred a copy of her order to the New York State Bar for potential disciplinary review — a fact Sen. Blumenthal noted has, to his knowledge, no precedent for a sitting attorney general.
The “Anti-Weaponization Fund”: A $1.776 Billion Question
Much of the hearing’s most technical sparring concerned the fund Blanche established by order on May 18, to compensate parties — including, Democrats noted, January 6 defendants — from a settlement tied to the Trump family’s IRS lawsuit. Blanche repeatedly testified that the fund is “dead,” “moot,” and “not moving forward,” but declined multiple senators’ requests to formally rescind the underlying order or submit a court declaration confirming its demise.
Sen. Cornyn pointed out that the settlement agreement itself can be modified only by written agreement of the parties, and no such modification exists — meaning, he suggested, the fund remains legally revivable. Sen. Hirono made the same point more bluntly: “you have not rescinded that order.” Sen. Tillis, while broadly sympathetic to Blanche, said he wanted to “stick a fork in this turkey” and asked for administration cooperation on legislative language to formally end the fund; Blanche agreed to provide “technical assistance.” Sen. Coons noted that a federal judge had that week written that Blanche’s own sworn testimony on the matter was “at best misleading and at worst disingenuous,” a characterization Blanche disputed, saying he continues to believe his reading of 11th Circuit precedent is correct.
Sen. Padilla asked directly whether someone who “forcibly entered U.S. Capitol and assaulted law enforcement” should be eligible for payouts; Blanche said such a person “would likely not recover funds” under the fund’s now-moot parameters but would not answer categorically.
The Trump Family IRS Settlement
Separately from the weaponization fund, senators focused on a settlement Blanche signed on May 19 resolving a $10 billion lawsuit President Trump and family members had filed against the IRS over the leak of his tax returns by contractor Charles Littlejohn. Under questioning from Durbin, Blanche confirmed the settlement releases the plaintiffs from liability tied to past IRS audits — the case was resolved for an apology and no monetary payment to the plaintiffs, plus the anti-weaponization fund — while insisting it created no protection for any taxes filed after the agreement’s signing date.
Sen. Schiff pressed further, asking whether the agreement shields President Trump or his sons from liability on last year’s roughly $1.4 billion in crypto-related income once they file taxes for that year. Blanche maintained the release does not apply “forward-looking” and that “he’s not protected,” though he could not say who within the department drafted the settlement’s release language or explain the department’s position on the case’s two-year statute of limitations, since the underlying leak occurred in 2020 but the suit was filed in 2026. Sen. Cornyn separately questioned whether the release’s broad language — covering “lawfare” and “weaponization,” terms he noted are not defined in any statute or case law — could be read to extend beyond the IRS and Treasury; Blanche said it applies only to those two agencies.
January 6 Pardons and Their Aftermath
Sen. Coons established that more than 200 people were convicted of assaulting law enforcement officers on January 6, and that President Trump pardoned or commuted every January 6 defendant by the evening of his inauguration. Coons quoted Blanche’s own remarks at a CPAC event celebrating that “by 5 p.m. on January 20th, every one of them was either pardoned or had their sentence commuted.” Blanche said he was not celebrating the pardons but “merely stating a fact.” Sen. Whitehouse listed a series of related actions — vacating seditious-conspiracy convictions against Proud Boys and Oath Keepers members, hiring a January 6 rioter Whitehouse said had urged the mob to kill police, and scrubbing related press releases — all of which Blanche called “absolutely false,” except for confirming the vacated convictions were his department’s doing under the law following the pardons.
Sen. Tillis, while defending the administration on other fronts, said of the January 6 pardons: “I get pretty emotional about that,” and pressed for more transparency in the pardon process generally, including the commutation of a Binance founder convicted in a money-laundering case, whose company subsequently directed billions toward the Trump family’s crypto venture, World Liberty Financial. Sen. Padilla confirmed that at least 97 pardoned January 6 defendants have since been accused of new crimes, including violent offenses.
Judicial Criticism and Departmental Conduct
Sen. Whitehouse presented what he described as an unprecedented pattern: a federal judge’s finding of possible “fraud on the court” committed by the Justice Department in the IRS settlement litigation, referred to New York’s bar for discipline, alongside what he called a “word cloud” of unusually harsh language from judges across the political spectrum describing DOJ conduct during Blanche’s tenure. Blanche called the characterization “cherry-picking” against the backdrop of nearly 100,000 indictments filed since January 2025.
Antitrust Enforcement and Corporate Conflicts
Sen. Klobuchar raised DOJ’s settlement of its monopolization suit against Live Nation and Ticketmaster, asking why the department settled rather than joining a parallel state attorneys-general suit still in litigation; Blanche called the settlement “good for consumers.” She also cited on-the-record comments from a former Republican DOJ antitrust official alleging cases are resolved “based on political connections, not the legal merits” — an allegation Blanche rejected as untrue.
The sharpest antitrust exchange came from Sen. Booker, who established that Blanche was “part of” the decision to close DOJ’s investigation into the proposed $111 billion Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger, and that Blanche attended a dinner hosted by Skydance’s David Ellison — honoring President Trump — on the same day Paramount shareholders voted to approve the deal, while the investigation was still open. The probe closed roughly six weeks later. Blanche said he did not discuss the deal with Ellison that evening and that his attendance, like all his outside appearances, was cleared by DOJ ethics officials; he said he did not know whether career antitrust attorneys had recommended closing the investigation.
Crypto Enforcement
Sen. Durbin and Sen. Hirono both questioned Blanche’s decision, shortly after becoming deputy attorney general, to dismantle DOJ’s dedicated Crypto Enforcement team, at a time Blanche held roughly $159,000 in crypto-related assets before transferring them to his children and grandchild. Hirono cited FBI data showing Americans reported more than $11 billion in crypto fraud losses last year. Blanche disputed the word “eviscerate,” saying the change empowered individual U.S. attorneys nationwide to bring crypto cases rather than centralizing the work in Washington, and that crypto prosecutions are “way up” as a result.
Reproductive Rights: The Abortion Pill Fight
Several senators — Grassley, Cornyn, Britt, Hawley and Cruz — raised the Biden-era relaxation of in-person dispensing requirements for mifepristone and the pending Louisiana v. FDA litigation. Blanche repeatedly declined to discuss litigation strategy but confirmed the department is not defending the Biden-era policy on the merits, that it is defending Trump’s earlier, more restrictive rule, and that the FDA is conducting its first substantive safety review of the drug in a decade.
Sen. Britt described the case of a Missouri woman whose then-boyfriend allegedly crushed an abortion pill into her drink without her consent; Sen. Hawley described a similar case involving a woman named Rosalie Markovich, and asked Blanche to consider standing up a dedicated “Protecting Women and Children Initiative” to pursue coerced-abortion cases; Blanche said he would “very much commit to looking at that.”
Sen. Cruz asked Blanche to commit to reviewing a Biden-era Office of Legal Counsel opinion interpreting the 1873 Comstock Act as generally not barring the mailing of abortion drugs; Blanche agreed to review it “to ensure that it faithfully reflects the actual statutory text.”
Immigration Enforcement and Officer-Involved Shootings
Sen. Klobuchar raised the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti during federal immigration enforcement in Minnesota, saying federal authorities refused for months to cooperate with state investigators despite a judicial warrant; Blanche disputed the characterization of events as inaccurate but committed to continued information-sharing. She also asked about an elderly Hmong man in Minnesota allegedly removed from his home in freezing weather without a warrant; Blanche said constitutional protections against warrantless entry apply to citizens but suggested a more limited standard for people in the country illegally.
Sen. Padilla raised two additional fatal federal shootings — of Ismael Salgado Araujo in Houston and Juan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine — asking what role DOJ should play in independent review of officer-involved shootings; Blanche said the appropriate process depends on which agency employed the officer involved.
Is the Department Independent of the White House?
A recurring theme, raised most directly by Sens. Coons and Padilla, was whether DOJ operates independently of President Trump. Blanche stated plainly that the department “is part of the executive” branch under Article II, that he serves “at the pleasure” of the president, and that Trump “can fire me whenever he wants.” Padilla said Blanche had told him in a private meeting that “independence” was “a misnomer” for the department; Blanche denied saying that. Sen. Coons asked whether Blanche would resign if directed to take an action he believed illegal or unethical; Blanche said, “That will never happen, but yes.”
Sen. Hirono asked whether Blanche believed it was the president’s “right and duty” to order investigations of perceived political enemies, following his own April comment to reporters that it was Trump’s “right” and “duty” to do so; Blanche said his prior comment reflected Article II authority generally, not license to target enemies specifically. Hirono also cited a directive, issued shortly after Trump publicly called for RICO charges against George Soros, that instructed U.S. Attorney’s offices to investigate Soros’ charitable foundations.
Recusal and Conflicts of Interest
Sen. Schiff’s questioning focused on whether Blanche’s prior representation of Trump in three criminal cases — the New York hush-money case, the January 6 case, and the Mar-a-Lago documents case — created disqualifying conflicts. Blanche confirmed DOJ ethics counsel Joseph Tirrell advised he recuse himself from matters tied to those cases, and said he has done so, but Schiff highlighted CPAC remarks in which Blanche took credit for firing DOJ personnel who had worked on those prosecutions, and Blanche’s involvement in dismissing cases against pardoned Proud Boys and Oath Keepers defendants. Schiff also pressed, unsuccessfully, for Blanche’s position on releasing “Volume 2” of the special counsel’s Mar-a-Lago report; Blanche said a federal judge has blocked its release and that he had no role in that litigation.
The exchange ended with Schiff invoking biographer Robert Caro — “power doesn’t corrupt as much as it reveals” — and asking, “What happened to you, Todd Blanche?” Blanche responded that he remains “the same exact person I was when I was a federal prosecutor” in the Southern District of New York.
Crime-Fighting Record and City-Level Successes
Republican senators spent significant time highlighting local results. Sen. Blackburn detailed the Memphis Safe Task Force: 11,040 arrests to date, nearly 2,000 firearms seized, 155 children recovered, and a roughly 60 percent drop in D.C. homicides and 40 percent drop in Memphis crime overall following federal-state task force operations. Sen. Schmitt credited a similar surge of permanent FBI agents in St. Louis. Grassley’s opening statement put violent-crime arrests up 184 percent nationwide (Blanche’s own opening cited a figure “nearly 114 percent”), and Sen. Cruz walked through a further, separate set of year-over-year statistics Blanche confirmed under oath, including a 365 percent increase in gangs disrupted or dismantled, a 519 percent increase in Tren de Aragua arrests, and the largest one-year drop in violent crime and murder since 1937.
Fraud Enforcement
Sen. Moody, Sen. Lee and Sen. Schmitt highlighted the new National Fraud Enforcement Division, describing a 2026 healthcare fraud takedown charging 455 defendants in schemes exceeding $6.5 billion, and citing independent fraud investigators — Nick Shirley and James O’Keefe were both named — whose findings Moody said had been dismissed by Democratic governors in Minnesota and California. Blanche said the department has “charged… over 300” elder-fraud cases this year alone and pledged continued focus regardless of confirmation.
Other Notable Exchanges
Sen. Kennedy used a rapid-fire line of questioning to establish that Blanche is not “enemies” with Trump, has disagreed with him without resigning or holding a press conference about it, and would refuse an illegal order — while repeatedly, half-jokingly, asking Blanche to “check” whether Jack Smith had accessed his own emails. Sen. Whitehouse asked pointed questions about FBI Director Kash Patel’s travel and conduct, which Blanche called “an extraordinarily obnoxious question” while affirming “full faith” in Patel. Sen. Welch questioned the firing of former pardon attorney Liz Oyer, who had declined to restore Mel Gibson’s gun rights, and raised reports that U.S. Marshals attempted to serve her with a letter at her home while her young son was alone; Blanche denied any connection between the Gibson matter and her firing and disputed Welch’s characterization of the service attempt. Sen. Welch also questioned whether DOJ subpoenas to reporters over a Qatari jet security story infringed on press-source protections; Blanche said the reporters were being treated as material witnesses, not targets.
Letters Entered Into the Record
Throughout the hearing, Grassley entered letters supporting the nomination from former Attorney General John Ashcroft; the National Association of Police Organizations (representing more than 1,000 police organizations and 250,000 officers); the National Fraternal Order of Police (382,000 members); Americans United for Life; American Border Story (300 “angel families”); the United Coalition of Public Safety; the Newark Police Superior Officers Association; a group of civil rights lawyers; and retired NYPD homicide detective and ATF agent Peter Forcelli. Durbin entered six letters from Epstein survivors opposing the nomination and a letter from more than 1,200 former DOJ employees also opposing it.
What Happens Next
Grassley adjourned the hearing without a vote, noting written questions for the record are due by 5 p.m. Friday, July 17. The committee was scheduled to reconvene the next morning for an executive business meeting followed by a panel of outside witnesses on the nomination.
Source
“Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing the Nomination of the Honorable Todd Blanche to Be Attorney General of the United States, Day 1.” Political Transcript Wire, 15 July 2026, ProQuest, www.proquest.com/usnews/wire-feeds/senate-judiciary-committee-hearing-nomination/docview/3364561494/