President Trump said Thursday that he is open to temporarily withdrawing Todd Blanche's nomination to be attorney general, after two Republican senators declined to advance it.
"I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd's name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office," Trump wrote, referring to Senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Both senators' current terms end in January.
The maneuver would change little in practice at the Justice Department. Blanche is already serving as acting attorney general, a role that does not require Senate confirmation, and he would continue in it whether or not the nomination is pending.
What the senators are asking for
The objection is narrow and specific. It concerns the settlement Trump reached with the Internal Revenue Service over his own tax audits, which created a fund of roughly $1.776 billion to pay people who said the agency had been used against them, and which gave Trump and his family immunity from being audited on returns filed before the settlement.
Cornyn says Blanche told the Judiciary Committee in testimony that the fund was dead, and he wants that commitment in writing. The Justice Department has not put it in writing, and Cornyn has treated that refusal as significant in itself. Tillis has withheld support on the same grounds.
Neither senator has said he opposes Blanche's confirmation outright. Both have framed their position as a hold pending documentation rather than a rejection of the nominee.
The nominee
Blanche spent more than fifteen years as a federal prosecutor, most of it in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, where he supervised the violent crimes unit before moving into white-collar defense work in private practice. He represented Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chairman, and in 2023 became lead counsel on Trump's own criminal defense team. He joined the administration as deputy attorney general and moved up to the acting role earlier this year.
What happens next
The nomination has not been advanced out of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The question is whether the department produces the written assurance the two senators have asked for, or whether the White House prefers to wait until January, when the Senate's composition changes and the two holds go with it.
The choice Trump has described is not a procedural formality. Withdrawing and resubmitting a nomination to outlast two senators of his own party is an unusual public statement about where the disagreement actually sits, and it leaves the Justice Department led on an acting basis for months longer.
