Another Key GOP Senator Hesitant to Back Blanche

Another key Republican member of the Senate Judiciary Committee opened the door Tuesday to voting against the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Todd Blanche, leaving a potentially thorny path for him to stay atop the Justice Department.

Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas who represents a crucial swing vote on the committee, said he had a meeting with Blanche on Tuesday but refused to fully back him.

“It was a positive meeting, but I didn’t reach any conclusions,” Cornyn said. “I’m going to wait until after the hearing, but he’s obviously a good lawyer and he gave a lawyer’s answers to my questions. So, I thought it was a good start.”

Cornyn said the two spoke about an unprecedented legal settlement between the Justice Department and Trump that includes a controversial section that bars the IRS from auditing Trump or his family. The Texas senator, who will be leaving the chamber in January after losing a bitter Republican primary to the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, has been a critic of the settlement and said he was looking forward to discussing it further with Blanche.

“I just need some more facts, some more information,” Cornyn said, “which Todd Blanche promised me.”

Cornyn isn’t the first lawmaker to waffle on the nomination. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, has also made it clear that he’s not an automatic “yes” on Blanche.

“The key for Todd, or anybody going through Judiciary Committee, is being pretty tight on Jan. 6. They better not have said for one minute that the people that beat up police officers … were righteous people,” Tillis said earlier this month. “You come even close to saying that, you don’t have a [chance] of getting my vote in Judiciary.”

The Judiciary Committee is split 12-10 between Republicans and Democrats, and an even break would effectively kill the nomination. This means Blanche must secure the vote of every Republican for his nomination to make it to the full Senate floor.

When asked if he was confident in Blanche’s chances of confirmation, Senate Majority Leader John Thune said: “It’s all going to depend on the Judiciary Committee.”

“If he comes to the floor, we’ll do everything and get him scheduled and going on and hopefully confirmed,” Thune told reporters. “But it’s a process, and that process has got some steps involved with it, and I know he’s having meetings with senators both on and off of the committee right now, and so we’ll let the process play out.”

In addition to his tough path out of the Senate, Blanche is also being called upon by House lawmakers to testify on the Epstein files.

Rep. James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, told reporters last week that he is pushing to have Blanche testify in front of the panel this July on his handling of the release of millions of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein.

“The main thing that we have for Blanche is the question on what, if any, documents are left out there,” Comer said. “So that’s the main question.”