You helped sideline Todd Blanche. Here's why that really matters.
A group of people showed up in Washington on a mission and didn't take "no" for an answer. Now a corrupt man is against the ropes.
Todd Blanche was already in trouble this week. Then nearly a dozen Epstein survivors showed up in Washington, D.C., to confront the senators responsible for his fate.
The woman in this photo is Dani Bensky. She’s an Epstein survivor, and this is her on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, just before we marched to the offices of senators on the committee that was—until recently—actively considering whether to make Todd Blanche the attorney general of the United States.
She’s smiling because she’s about to confront corruption, and she knows the truth is on her side.
Less than an hour after I took this photo, Dani was standing outside the office of Senator John Cornyn, telling reporters about the condescension survivors endured when they finally got their long-sought meeting with Blanche. They had waited nine months for the acting attorney general to sit down with them. When he finally did, he showed annoyance during the meeting, at one moment saying to survivors: “Can you get to the point?”
Here’s what I’d say to the AG: The point, Todd, was standing in the hallway outside Senator Cornyn’s door this week. She was holding a bound volume of the files from the investigation that you helped shut down… that you spent a year trying to bury… and that you have been lying about ever since. Senator Cornyn was already wavering on your nomination, along with Senator Thom Tillis (whom Dani managed to corner near an elevator bank and pressure to vote “no”). But she and her fellow survivors got to them one last time to remind them about your corruption and how putting one man above the law has done grave damage to people’s lives.
Now do you see the point, Todd?
By the end of the day, Blanche’s nomination was in peril and the committee vote was off. By Thursday morning, Trump announced he’d be willing to pull the nomination (“temporarily,” he insisted) until he can restock the Senate with more compliant members. He dressed the retreat up as a victory, the way he always does, but nobody was fooled. My former boss, the man who always demands total submission, spent his morning explaining why backing down was actually a masterstroke.
This is why defiance matters. When we decided to convene the survivors in the nation’s capital, it was to make a closing argument against Blanche and to declare that, no matter how the vote went, the pressure would not stop. They unveiled the Trump-Epstein Bookmobile—a truck that will carry all 3.5 million pages, printed and digital, across the country—powered by DEFIANCE.org and the Institute for Primary Facts. Then, alongside Reckoning Action, we all marched together to Capitol Hill itself for a last stand… office to office… senator to senator.
And it worked.
To be fair, Cornyn and Tillis were already uneasy because of Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund and IRS sweetheart deal. But wavering is not the same as threatening to vote “no.” Washington is a city where wavering men usually find a reason to fall in line, and this administration is very good at supplying the reason. What seemed to change, in part, was the added voice of the survivors. How Blanche treated them made the moral cost of a “yes” vote even higher than it already was.
This is the oldest lesson in the democratic playbook, and also the one we most often forget. The margin between a good outcome and a bad one is rarely some grand structural force. It’s ordinary people trying their damnedest. Often, it’s whether a handful of citizens show up at the right moment and then refuse to back down until they get a sign of progress. Defiance is a key variable, and this week it appeared to be the decisive one.
So yes, the big news is that Blanche’s nomination is on ice. A dangerous man now sits in limbo, denied (at least for the moment) permanent installation in the most powerful legal job on earth. A job he sought as a “yes man” to a wannabe dictator. He remains acting attorney general, of course, and Trump has vowed to try again with a friendlier Senate. So this fight will resume at some point.
But the bigger news is what made it possible. Almost every day now, we read stories about real people coming together against the regime’s corruption—and winning. If you’re reading this, you’re a part of that. This week, you stood with these survivors… helped magnify their voices… and gave them the ability to make good on the threat that they’d be barnstorming the country on this issue, whether or not senators found their consciences.
I have been moved by Dani Bensky since the day I met her, in the basement of the Trump-Epstein Memorial Reading Room, which was the pop-up we helped incubate that inspired the bookmobile. For years, she and the women she calls “survivor sisters” have refused to take “no” for an answer from Epstein’s enablers, from multiple presidential administrations, and from an acting attorney general who told them to get to the point. We’re honored to stand with them.
Look at Dani’s smile in that photo one more time. That’s what it looks like to know the truth is on your side and to act like it. Stay loud like Dani. If we do that, they can’t shut us up.
Your friend, in defiance,
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