Reason Magazine Comes Out Swinging Against Confirming Todd Blanche as AG: ‘Brazenly Corrupt’

Reason, the nation’s leading libertarian magazine, was exercising its writers’ First Amendment rights at full volume this week, voicing their opposition to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche‘s confirmation to lead the Department of Justice in multiple columns featured on its website.

Blanche previously served as Deputy Attorney General during Pam Bondi’s tenure, and President Donald Trump appointed him to interim Attorney General after her ouster.

Keeping the gig on a permanent basis, however, requires Senate confirmation, and Blanche has drawn notably vocal criticism, if not outright hostility, from thousands of former DOJ employees, former judges, attorneys, bar associations, and other legal advocacy groups.

Blanche’s critics have cited his past work as Trump’s personal lawyer, vindictive prosecutions of Trump’s political opponents, his role in shepherding the pardons for the January 6 Capitol rioters, the handling of the Epstein files, and his controversial interview with Jeffrey Epstein’s former girlfriend and accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell — not to mention her transfer shortly thereafter to Federal Prison Camp (FPC) Bryan in Bryan, Texas, a minimum-security facility that is not commonly used to house inmates convicted of crimes as serious as Maxwell’s.

The move to this “cushy prison camp” was sharply criticized by several of Epstein and Maxwell’s victims.

It was Blanche’s role in the purported “settlement” of a complaint Trump and his family filed against the IRS that was the focus of much of the opprobrium found on Reason’s website, however.

In that lawsuit, Trump made the outlandish and baseless claim that the illegal disclosure of their tax returns by an IRS contractor had caused “at least” $10 billion in damages. As interim AG, Blanche — who, again, was appointed by Trump and owes his continued federal employment to the president — approved a settlement that would shield the Trumps from any liability for tax violations and created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that was swiftly denounced as a “slush fund.”

On Monday, Judge Kathleen Williams with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, an Obama appointee, nullified the settlement, finding it was a “collusive” lawsuit and not a true controversy between opposing parties, since both sides were controlled by the president.

The purported “settlement,” wrote Williams, was an“attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”

The judge even went so far as to refer several of the attorneys involved to their state bar associations for disciplinary proceedings, and ordered the clerk of the court to send her order to the New York Bar, where “disciplinary proceedings are currently ongoing” against Blanche.

This “brazenly corrupt” attempted settlement was the impetus behind a column published Wednesday by Reason senior editor Jacob Sullum, headlined “By Blessing Corruption, Todd Blanche Has Disqualified Himself From the Job He Wants.”

Blanche’s role in securing that settlement, along with the “laughable” efforts to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey, “demonstrated his eagerness to please his boss, which explains why Trump nominated him to replace Pam Bondi,” wrote Sullum. “But that same tendency should alarm anyone who thinks the attorney general should pursue justice rather than the president’s personal agenda.”

“That case shows Blanche is willing to subvert justice in service of the president’s grudges, and his participation in the IRS ‘settlement’ shows he is happy to bless a grossly unethical product of self-dealing,” Sullum added. “Either would be enough to disqualify him from the job he is seeking.”

Sullum followed up his column with another after the first day of Blanche’s confirmation hearing, focusing again on the aspiring attorney general’s defense of the IRS settlement.

Noting Blanche’s apparent “I’m his lawyer — was his lawyer” flub, Sullum wrote that “the slip went to the heart of the main question that senators should be asking as they decide whether to confirm Blanche’s nomination as attorney general: Would he use that position to pursue justice or to advance Trump’s personal interests?”

“Probably the latter,” Sullum answered his question, because of “Blanche’s central role” in the IRS settlement, which he again bashed as “brazenly corrupt,” “flagrantly dishonest,” and “grossly unethical” for being “blatant self-dealing” and a “cozy arrangement, which was predicated on a lawsuit that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams said was phony from the beginning, [and] delivered huge favors to Trump, his family, and his followers at taxpayers’ expense.”

Blanche’s claims during his hearing that the settlement and much-derided slush fund were “dead for good” were empty promises, Sullum wrote, because of the text of the agreement, plus the shockingly broad grant of immunity for the Trumps, topics Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) raised during his questioning of Blanche:

Blanche actively participated in this scam, which he compounded by issuing an order that purported to shield Trump and his relatives from liability for tax violations and any other federal offenses they may have committed. Blanche presented that sweeping grant of immunity, which could save Trump more than $100 million in back taxes, interest, and penalties, as an addendum to the “settlement agreement.” But unlike the main agreement, it was signed only by Blanche, reinforcing the point that he was simultaneously acting as the head of the Justice Department and as Trump’s personal lawyer.

According to Blanche, the jaw-dropping immunity deal, which had nothing to do with Trump’s claims against the IRS, remains in place. During Wednesday’s hearing, Cornyn noted the broad language of Blanche’s order, which says “the United States” is “FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED” from pursuing “any and all claims” against Trump or his family regarding “any matters currently pending or that could be pending” before the IRS, the Treasury Department, or “other agencies or departments.”

In addition to protecting Trump and his relatives from the IRS, Cornyn suggested, that commitment would shield them from actions by other agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission. Not so, Blanche said, contradicting the language of his own order. “I hear what you’re saying,” Cornyn replied, “but that’s not what I’m seeing in the agreement.”

Sullum followed up with a third column on Thursday’s hearing, again calling out Blanche for his unwavering defense of the IRS settlement. (And yes, the “brazenly corrupt” label made another appearance in Sullum’s writing.) Blanche “preposterously” defended the settlement as a “typical” one for the IRS, wrote Sullum, a claim that was “inapt for several reasons,” including that it was such “unprecedented relief” that it “resembles a preemptive self-pardon, except that it extends further, covering civil as well as criminal offenses.”

Mediaite spoke to Sullum by phone about his columns on Blanche, and if anything, he was even sharper in his criticism over the phone than in his writing.

He said that out of all the issues people have raised about Blanche, he chose to focus on the IRS settlement because it was “such a blatant example of self-dealing” that enriched the president, his family, his friends, and supporters.

Blanche might not have negotiated it but did approve it and literally signed off on it, Sullum pointed out, even though, as the judge ruled, this was “not a real case from the beginning” and was “fatally flawed” because of the expired statute of limitations.

Normally, said Sullum, the DOJ “always defends” these kinds of cases, especially where there is a simple procedural defense like the statute of limitations.

Adding in the “obviously fictional number” of $10 billion Trump demanded as damages just illustrated the ridiculousness of the case, and the willingness of Blanche to agree to set up the slush fund to pay still-unnamed people was “not logically related” to the underlying lawsuit and a “completely insane” resolution of a legal dispute, said Sullum.

Normally, for a lawsuit like this against the IRS claiming a contractor violated a taxpayer’s privacy, Sullum pointed out, one would expect perhaps an agreement by the IRS to take remedial measures, conduct training and audits, provide better supervision and control over contracts to prevent these sort of wrongful disclosures, but this settlement with Trump did not contain any reforms like this. It was just to grant Trump this highly unusual immunity that was “ostensibly restraining not just the IRS” but also all federal agencies for all time, “renouncing forever” all claims before the date of that agreement.

“I don’t tire of that topic [of the IRS settlement] because it’s so completely insane,” Sullum told Mediaite, citing CATO Institute senior fellow Walter Olson’s assessment that it was possibly “[t]he most corrupt act ever taken by an American president.”

The danger with Blanche, Sullum continued, is that “he’s so desperate for this job that he’ll do anything Trump wants and we don’t want someone like that in this job.”

Regarding the Comey case, Sullum said the only way for an attorney to support that prosecution moving forward was by “totally sacrificing his legal ethics,” and expressed skepticism that Blanche actually thought it was a “viable” case.

“We don’t need any more information” besides the IRS settlement and Comey case to find Blanche unsuitable to be AG, argued Sullum.

The controversy over the Epstein files “consumes a lot of people’s time,” he added, but he thought it paled in comparison to the specific and concrete examples we had of “abuses of powers” by Blanche’s DOJ.

Asked if he felt like his highly critical view of Blanche was shared by his Reason colleagues, Sullum replied that he did not feel like he was an “outlier,” noting that the magazine’s staffers had a long-running tradition of disclosing their presidential votes and there were a few Trump votes but not the majority.

Sullum’s columns on Blanche were put in featured spots on Reason’s homepage throughout the day Wednesday and again on Thursday with his update on the day’s hearing, and cycled through the website’s “Most Read” sidebar, indicating the topic was of great interest to Reason’s readership as well.

Another Reason contributor, editor at large and former editor in chief Matt Welch, has also used his column space to excoriate Blanche, featuring him prominently in an article titled “The Most Corrupt Presidency in American History, by the Numbers.”

One reason to vote against Blanche’s confirmation, Welch told Mediaite over the phone, was simply “the fact that he was the president’s defense lawyer and has acted like that as AG.”

Welch took specific issue with the decision to drop the corruption case against former New York City Mayor Eric Adams, which “so obviously reeks of corruption” and led to the resignation of ten U.S. attorneys who were “outraged by the low quality of thinking that went into it and the quid pro quo.”

That mass exodus was “Trump’s Saturday Night Massacre,” said Welch, referring to a mass resignation in President Richard Nixon’s DOJ during the Watergate scandal.

Mediaite asked Welch, from his perspective as the magazine’s former editor-in-chief, about the libertarian take on such issues. For libertarians, replied Welch, there is a strong interest in “power,” specifically the “critique” and “suspicion” of how it is exercised and imposed.

Sometimes that will be in a positive sense, like some of the deregulation efforts by the Trump administration, and many libertarians approved of the administration’s stance on Second Amendment issues.

However, Welch continued, there is also a negative side when we see a “cronyist machine trying to politicize what should be nonpolitical,” using government agencies to go after the president’s enemies and political opponents.

“This is appalling from a libertarian point of view,” said Welch, and these problems had only gotten worse “comparing Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0.”

It might be “inconvenient” to have these problems pointed out for the libertarians who voted for him and support some of his agenda, but ignoring that is “not our job as journalists.”

This current administration is “corrupt in a way that we just have not seen, and we need to confront that,” Welch concluded.

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