Acting US Attorney General Todd Blanche is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearing on his nomination to become Attorney General on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, US, on July 15, 2026.
Jonathan Ernst | reuters
Todd Blanche, who first gained national attention as President Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyer, faces senate judiciary A hearing will be held on Wednesday to review his nomination by the Republican President to become US Attorney General.
Blanche, 51, has served as acting attorney general since early April, when Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi over her handling of issues related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump praised Blanche in a Truth Social post on Tuesday, calling him a “great lawyer, always very fair” and writing, “Every Republican senator should vote to confirm Todd Blanche as soon as possible.”
But Bondi’s departure doesn’t mean that the controversy over the DOJ’s conduct regarding the release of documents related to Epstein — and other actions taken by the department with Blanch’s involvement — has gone away.
Democrats, who are in the minority on the committee, are expected to grill Blanche over her decision in January not to publicly release millions of pages of information about Epstein after initially disclosing more than 3 million pages, when she was deputy attorney general. Under a law passed by Congress in November, the DOJ is required to release all of its documents about Epstein.
A group of Epstein victims released a video this week urging the Senate to impeach Blanch as attorney general because her personal information was made public when the DOJ released the files, even though that information was supposed to be redacted.
The DOJ said in a January 30 statement about the final release of the files that the files that were withheld fall into several categories, including duplicate documents from different investigations and files withheld under certain legal privileges.
Blanch is also sure to face questions about her decision to create a $1.8 billion so-called anti-gunfire fund for the DOJ to compensate people who were alleged victims of prosecutorial overreach by the Justice Department.
The fund, which Blanche canceled amid sharp criticism from Republican senators and Democrats, was part of an out-of-court settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS over the leaking of his tax records. While Blanch has said the fund will not be created, Trump has floated the idea of reviving its creation.
That agreement included giving Trump, his family members and related business entities effective immunity from audit, prosecution or regulatory enforcement action by the IRS for tax returns filed by the settlement date in May.
On Monday, a federal judge in Miami said in a strict ruling that Trump had sued the IRS for an “improper purpose” to “obtain judicial validity for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.” The judge ordered that a copy of his order be sent to the New York State Bar Association, of which Blanch is a member, and which is considering the ethics complaint pending against him.
“There was no collusion in this case, and a partisan judge who would have inferred otherwise ignored decades of precedent,” a DOJ spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.
“The plaintiffs did not receive any money and are barred from receiving anything from the now-defunct anti-arms fund,” the spokesperson said.
Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, told reporters Tuesday afternoon that he had a 30-minute meeting with Blanche earlier in the day that included a discussion about the fund.
Durbin said Blanche told him: “‘What else can I do? What else can I say? I made a mistake. I don’t want to see the armaments fund go forward.'”
Durbin said he then asked Blanche, “Why don’t you put it in writing? Do something so it’s a credible statement you made?”
The senator reported that Blanch said he would be willing to work with Congress to codify that the fund cannot be diverted.
“It seemed like a very weak defense,” Durbin said.
CNBC has requested comment from the DOJ regarding that account.
Another area of contention that Democrats are expected to focus on is the federal prosecutions of people Trump considers his enemies — former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James — which were pursued last year by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. That office is overseen by the DOJ.
Those cases, whose allegations were strongly denied by both defendants, were dismissed by a judge in November after he ruled that the interim US attorney who filed the case was illegally appointed.
But Comey was re-indicted in April in the Eastern District of North Carolina federal court on charges that he threatened to kill Trump by posting an image of seashells with the message “86 47” on Instagram.
A DOJ spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC that both James and Comey were “indicted by a federal grand jury on serious felony charges.”
“Criminals cannot be exempted from charges of these serious crimes simply because of who they are,” the spokesperson said.
– CNBC Justin Papp Contributed to this article.