Trump's DOJ chief has a new nickname: Todd "Carte Blanche."

As Congress considers his nomination, the head of the Justice Department appears willing to do whatever Donald Trump wants. Law and logic be damned.

Yesterday, Donald Trump nominated Todd Blanche to run DOJ. As the Senate considers whether to make the man attorney general, we hope they’ll adopt our official nickname for him: Todd “Carte Blanche.”

Todd Blanche’s qualification for the nation’s top law-enforcement post is not a glittering record as a prosecutor (though he was once considered something of a mainstream lawyer). It turns out that his real qualification is that he spent the last several years as Donald Trump’s personal defense attorney, fighting indictment after indictment. He’s carried into DOJ that sidecar, ride-or-die, love-like-a-loyalist aesthetic into the department, where prosecutors under his watch have thrown out tens of thousands of corruption and national security cases, readjusting America’s legal firepower onto Trump’s personal foes and political targets, like Democrats, immigrants, and a vast array of presidential critics.

In effect, he’s given Trump “carte blanche” to do with the Justice Department whatever he pleases. The term is French for “blank document” or “blank cheque,” i.e. the full authority to act however one pleases, with no questions asked. No two words better capture what Blanche has handed his old client at the Justice Department.

I said as much on CNN the other night, below. And I wasn’t even the harshest voice on the panel. I was sitting on the screen alongside Mimi Rocah, the former New York district attorney who actually served with Todd Blanche, knew him well, and had every professional reason to give him the benefit of the doubt. She did, for a while.

“But my hopes about Mr. Blanche were quickly dashed,” she said, “because he’s never left the role of President Trump’s defense attorney…but that is absolutely not his job now.”

When a former colleague (who used to like you, no less) tells the country you’re unqualified, it’s not a good sign. The audition reel backs her up. Blanche has run obvious interference for Trump on the Epstein Files, helped birth a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” designed to shovel taxpayer money to criminals who conspired with or for the benefit of Trump, and has been the voice of the president’s legal revenge campaign against his enemies, willing to go on Sunday talk shows and — with a straight face — explain why a former FBI director posting vacation photos poses a threat to the life of a president.

To put it another way, Todd Blanche has shamelessly devoted himself to pleasing a president who’s hellbent on hacking the Constitution into kindling for a cacophonous corruption bonfire, the likes of which we’ve never seen in American history.

In that light, “unqualified” doesn’t seem to cut it.

Yet as the “acting” attorney general, he’s already running the place. The DOJ wrecking ball has been swinging, every day, into the walls of our democratic institutions. A demolition from the inside that Congress has done pathetically little to stop. So why write any of this, you ask, if the outcome feels ordained?

I’ll tell you. It’s because I hear a sound coming from the Republican side of the aisle. It’s not exactly the sound of “the resistance,” but it’s at least worth calling “the reluctance.” There’s a growing unease among Republican senators about Trump’s self-serving agenda. Surely some of them rolled their eyes at the nomination of Todd Carte Blanche, while others have voiced concern about Trump’s decision to hand the entire intelligence community to a housing official, Bill Pulte — a man who’s never worked in national security and whose only apparent qualification is that he, too, is willing to use his official powers to help go after Trump’s enemies.

So what’s that sound I hear? Somewhere inside the flaccid consciences of those Republican senators who I used to work with, there’s a smaller conscience trying to get attention. A conscience within a conscience. He’s squeaking desperately in the dark, while his master turns up the volume on Fox and Newsmax. I think we need to smuggle a megaphone in for that little guy. We’d like to help him deliver his message to the boss, clearly and loudly: “Stop! Don’t do it! Americans don’t want Todd Carte Blanche!”

Most Americans want to keep their Constitution intact. If senators merely consulted that dusty document, they’d recall that they have an essential role to play in preserving it. In this case, that means preventing sycophants from taking over the levers of justice in the United States of America. We didn’t vote our senators in to write blank cheques. We voted them in to balance the books.

Your friend, in defiance,

Miles Taylor
P.S. Help spread the defiance by sharing this post.

THE DEFIANCE WATCHLIST

We are tracking these stories today.

1. IRS CAUGHT MISUSING SENSITIVE TAX DATA. A new watchdog report confirms what we already suspected: the IRS is weaponizing its files for the White House. After being told to fork over tax data to ICE — ostensibly for Trump’s immigration crackdown — it appears that basic safety protocols weren’t followed, putting taxpayer information at risk for the people whose data was sent to ICE. Senator Ron Wyden is now calling for investigations. This comes on top of Senators sounding the alarm last year about the Trump administration weaponizing IRS data against political opponents, not to mention Trump’s sweetheart deal for himself to evade future IRS investigations into his own taxes. We reckon all this IRS data meddling is gonna get some folks sent to prison.

2. TRUMP, ONCE AGAIN, TRIES TO FIRE WHOEVER TELLS HIM “NO” — EVEN PEOPLE WHO DON’T WORK FOR HIM! The president took to social media yesterday to demand the U.S. Senate fire its parliamentarian, the chamber’s chief nonpartisan referee and rulebook expert. Why? Well, she ruled that Trump’s voter suppression bill — the SAVE America Act — didn’t belong in a bigger budget package. So Trump took to Truth Social demanding Majority Leader Thune “immediately” fire her, calling her “nasty.” Thune has refused the demand, warning it would destabilize the entire Senate. The Majority Leader is reportedly at his “breaking point” with Trump. We can’t imagine this helps.

3. TRUMP’S $100,000 VISA FEE WAS JUST RULED UNLAWFUL. A federal judge in Boston struck down the administration’s $100,000 fee on H-1B visas — a fee widely seen as another way to punitively curb legal immigration — ruling that the executive branch doesn’t have the authority to create what amounts to a new tax without congressional approval. The fee had triggered panic among employers, hospitals, and universities already struggling to hire doctors, teachers, and researchers. Trump allies called the ruling “judicial activism.” We call it the rule of law, striking back.

4. BONUS — ACT OF DEFIANCE — NEW YORK DID WHAT WE PREDICTED: BOOED THEIR HEARTS OUT. Yesterday, we forecasted that Trump’s attendance at the Knicks game in NYC would not go over well. New Yorkers delivered. The arena erupted in comedically loud disapproval of Trump, while he stood there with a dopey smile. Organizers clearly tried to avoid booing by featuring Trump on screen during the national anthem, perhaps thinking people wouldn’t shout him down during the nation’s song. No such luck. One outlet described the booing as “thunderous.”

WHAT’S COMING UP

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ONE MORE THING

Forward this email to someone who should join the defiance. We are growing the club. I won’t let a wannabe dictator destroy the country I spent my career protecting. That’s why I launched DEFIANCE.org — a club for courageous Americans asking, “WHAT CAN I DO?” Each week, we defy Trump by taking real action to thwart his abuses of power. Become a Member today at DEFIANCE.org/join or here on Substack. 100% of proceeds go to the pro-democracy fight. Or sign up for occasional updates for free below. We publish breaking news and analysis at DEFIANCE.News.