Acting U.S. Attorney Todd Blanche prepares to testify at a hearing of the House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on Commerce, Judiciary, Science, and Related Agencies on June 2, 2026, at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington, DC.
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Todd Blanche, who first gained national attention as President Donald Trump’s criminal defense attorney, will face a Senate Judiciary hearing Wednesday to review the Republican president’s nomination to be U.S. attorney general.
Blanche, 51, has been acting attorney general since early April, when President Trump fired Attorney General Pam Bondi over her handling of matters involving the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday, President Trump praised Branch, calling him a “great lawyer and always very fair,” and wrote, “Every Republican senator should vote to confirm Todd Branch immediately.”
But Mr. Bondi’s resignation did not mean an end to controversy over the Justice Department’s actions related to the release of documents related to Mr. Epstein or other actions of the department involving Mr. Branch.
The committee’s Democratic minority is expected to sharply criticize Mr. Branch for his decision not to release millions of pages about Mr. Epstein after initially releasing more than 3 million pages in January when he was deputy attorney general. Under a law passed by Congress in November, the Justice Department is required to release all documents it has about Epstein.
Epstein victims’ groups released a video this week urging the Senate to block Mr. Branch as attorney general, saying personal information was released by the Justice Department in the release of the files, even though the information should have been redacted.
In a Jan. 30 statement regarding the final release of the files, the Justice Department said the withheld files fall into several categories, including duplicate documents from various investigations and those withheld based on specific legal privileges.
Mr. Blanche is also certain to face questions about his decision to create a $1.8 billion so-called anti-weaponization fund at the Justice Department to compensate alleged victims of the department’s prosecutorial overreach.
The fund, which Mr. Blanche canceled in the face of harsh criticism from Republican senators and Democrats, was part of Mr. Trump’s settlement of a lawsuit he filed against the Internal Revenue Service over leaked tax records. Blanche said the fund would not be created, but President Trump has floated the idea of reviving it.
The settlement included providing effective immunity to Mr. Trump, his family, and related entities from IRS audits, prosecutions, and regulatory enforcement actions on tax returns filed through the May settlement date.
In a scathing order Monday, a Miami federal judge said President Trump sued the IRS for “improper purposes” to obtain “judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that has no viable basis in law or fact.” The judge ordered a copy of the order to be sent to the New York State Bar Association, of which Mr. Branch is a member and which is considering an ethics case against Mr. Branch.
“There was no collusion in this case, and the partisan judges who presumed otherwise ignored decades of precedent,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC.
“The plaintiffs received no money and were prohibited from receiving money from the now-defunct Anti-Weaponization Fund,” the spokesperson said.
Sen. 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 said, “‘What more can I do? What more can I say? I made a mistake. I don’t want to see the Weaponization Fund move forward.'”
Ms. Durbin said she then asked Ms. Blanche, “Why don’t you put it in writing? Can you do something so that it becomes your reliable statement?”
The senator recalled that Blanche said he was willing to work with Congress to codify that the creation of the fund was not possible.
“It looked like a very weak defense,” Durbin said.
CNBC has reached out to the Department of Justice for comment on the account.
Another area of contention that Democrats are expected to focus on is federal charges filed last fall by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia against people Trump considers enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. That office is overseen by the Department of Justice.
Those lawsuits were strongly denied by both defendants, and were dismissed in November when a judge ruled that the appointment of interim U.S. attorneys in the lawsuits was invalid.
But in April, Comey was re-indicted in federal court in the Eastern District of North Carolina for allegedly threatening to kill President Trump by posting an image on Instagram of a seashell formed with the message “86 47.”
A Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement to CNBC that both James and Comey “have been indicted by a federal grand jury on serious felonies.”
“Offenders cannot be excused from prosecution for these serious crimes simply because they are who they are,” the spokesperson said.
—CNBC’s Justin Papp contributed to this article.
