The Department of Justice, under acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, has clearly laid an egg. “When Justice is Politicized, the Courts are Resisting,” proclaims the front-page print headline in The New York Times. And Senate Republicans are, at long last, showing small signs of joining in the resistance.
Blanche is salivating to remove the word “acting” from his job description, so he does the bidding of his master, for whom he worked as a defense lawyer. In so doing, he is losing the respect of judges and lawyers, and making first-term attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions look like Elliot Richardson, the attorney general and a Watergate hero, by comparison. Blanche has hired inexperienced loyalists to fill senior roles even as hundreds of career prosecutors have departed, either of their own accord or after being forced out for working on cases targeting the president. It is a grim scene, not only for those who venerate the law, but also for Republican senators losing faith as the president uses “Main Justice” to reward friends and savage opponents.
Blanche may end up Trump’s pick for AG, but his confirmation chances are dimming if Trump pushes ahead with his plans for a settlement fund, financed by settling his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS for leaking his tax returns. For now, the administration has said it will abide by a court order pausing the fund’s establishment, and news reports suggest it might scuttle the fund entirely. We’ll see. But what it hasn’t done is publicly declare that it will kill the fund or any scheme to dole out tax dollars to January 6 perpetrators. “Saying you’re going to follow a court order doesn’t tell me anything,” Senator John Kennedy, the Louisiana Republican, told reporters on Monday. “You have to follow the court order.”
But when it comes to following court orders and abiding by legal norms, Trump’s DOJ doesn’t, so it’s worth looking at its handling of grand juries in the context of the settlement deal. It’s a reminder of how Trump and his DOJ can go too far and be rebuffed by courts—and now Republican senators.
“Any good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich,” famously said New York Court of Appeals Chief Judge Sol Wachtler. But the grand jury, inherited from England and long since abolished there, can refuse to indict citizens if the evidence is not there. Grand juries are said to breathe “the spirit of a community into the enforcement of law,” a guard rail against governmental excess.
Since Trump took office for the second time last year, the Justice Department has met serious difficulties presenting cases to grand juries. And federal judges have repeatedly admonished Trump prosecutors for misconduct.
The latest setback came in Chicago, where a judge cited a remarkable list of grand jury errors in dismissing an indictment against four Democratic activists about to stand trial for impeding the police during an autumn protest at an immigration detention facility.
The blunders angered the Joe Biden-nominated judge, April M. Perry, who bristled at prosecutors improperly speaking to grand jurors outside the grand jury room and their claim that the evidence was strong.
The Trump prosecutors also removed some grand jurors who had voted against them when considering an earlier version of the charges. Even worse, they tried to hide these maneuvers by redacting the grand jury transcripts—that is, until Judge Perry demanded full copies.
The government’s missteps necessitated dropping the case days before trial.
“Your sole goal is to do justice. Your client is justice itself,” Judge Perry told Andrew S. Boutros, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, who appeared in court to apologize. “I do believe deeply in the presumption of regularity and that most government attorneys are doing the best they can to do the right thing,” she said. “That trust has been broken.”
Natalie Baldassare, speaking for the Justice Department, tried to sugarcoat the cases in which prosecutors have been scolded for their grand jury presentations.
“These few cases are not representative of DOJ’s overall achievements to date,” she said, “and we will not be deterred in our efforts to hold criminals accountable and keep the American people safe.”
Oh, please.
In Wyoming recently, a three-judge panel threw out nine indictments—some charging murder—after grand jury proceedings revealed misconduct by Darin Smith, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney.
The judges ruled that Smith, a rookie prosecutor serving as a state senator and a Christian Broadcasting Network executive, told grand jurors that they would hear evidence concerning “bad guys” and “murderers” who “did what you are going to hear about.” He larded the pan with the comment that the last grand jury returned an indictment in only three minutes. When the West was won, they used to say, “We’re gonna give you a fair trial, followed by a first-class hanging.”
Finally, a new grand jury—one that Smith had never spoken to—indicted. The Senate confirmed Smith’s nomination just three days after the judges dismissed the cases, exposing his improprieties.
The jejune behavior of the prosecutors in Chicago and Wyoming channels what unfolded last September with former FBI director James Comey. Trump put Lindsey Halligan, a onetime insurance lawyer, in charge of the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia, after her seasoned predecessor was fired for refusing to file charges against Mr. Comey.
On her fourth day on the job, Halligan, who had never presented a case to a grand jury, appeared before the panel. Comey’s lawyers moved to inspect the grand jury transcripts. The Magistrate Judge William E. Fitzpatrick reviewed the transcripts and found that Halligan misrepresented basic aspects of the law.
A few days later, Ms. Halligan was hauled into court to explain her grand jury presentation. Questioned by a different judge, she acknowledged a rookie mistake: She never showed the full grand jury the final version of the indictment.
And Blanche’s new indictment of Comey—for allegedly threatening Trump’s life with a social media posting of seashells spelling out “86 47”—probably won’t make it to a jury.
Trump prosecutors have failed to get indictments in blue cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., where grand jurors rebuffed indicting protestors of the administration’s immigration crackdowns.
Other high-profile cases against Mr. Trump’s political and personal foes have included New York’s Attorney General Letitia James. In November, a judge tossed the James indictment for alleged mortgage fraud. When the DOJ tried to re-indict James, two separate grand juries didn’t buy the government’s proposed charges.
Then, there are the six Democratic lawmakers who posted a video reminding military and intelligence personnel of their obligation to disobey illegal orders. Those charges were also dismissed.
And the perjury investigation of writer E. Jean Carroll over her testimony against Trump in her civil suit alleging defamation of character scarcely bears mention. Blanche, who represented Trump in the matter, reportedly recused himself from the case, although his underlings at DOJ have been involved in the inquiry.
And that’s not all. A judge quashed D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s subpoena to the Federal Reserve, and DOJ eventually dropped its absurd effort to indict former Fed Chair Jerome Powell for the invisible crime of holding the line on interest rates.
A trial jury acquitted a man of misdemeanor charges that he had hurled a sandwich (not ham) at a Customs and Border Patrol officer, and grand juries refused to indict protesters for even more innocuous behavior.
Federal District Court Judge Waverly Crenshaw in Tennessee threw out the indictment of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the poster child for Trump’s immigration overreach. He was improperly deported to El Salvador, triggering a major flap. The Supreme Court mandated that the government “facilitate” Garcia’s return to the United States to enable him to contest his removal proceedings properly. The Trump administration noodled about the meaning of facilitate and eventually exfiltrated him in manacles under indictment.
The criminal case against Garcia was pretextual. As legal commentator Elie Honig wrote in June 2025, “because the administration got caught in a screwup, and then chose to flip off the Supreme Court rather than to comply with its directive, they created a political mess. The indictment became the easy way to mop it up.” Judge Crenshaw agreed that the indictment was a hit job: “The objective evidence here shows that, absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution … The evidence before this Court sadly reflects an abuse of prosecuting power.”
The Poodle Awakens
So where is Congress? The poodle awakens. If pushed, Congress can exercise the constitutional checks and balances. As King Charles III recently reminded, we inherited checks and balances on the executive from the Magna Carta. Congressional Republicans have raised their greying eyebrows about the purported settlement Trump made with himself, setting up a $1.8 billion fund to pay off pardoned January 6 criminals, as Blanche mused obtusely to CNN’s Paula Reid, “Just to be clear, people who hurt police get money all the time, okay?”
Even Senate Majority Leader John Thune hinted at dissent, noting that he was “not a big fan” of the fund and that “our members have very legitimate questions” about it. One of those members, Senator Thom Tillis, hung the bell on the cat: “I think it’s stupid on stilts.”
Meeting with Blanche, dozens of Republican senators exploded over the slush fund. With the power of the purse, they asked the tough questions about the “settlement’s” legal basis, whether it required congressional approval, and who would be the beneficiaries of the largesse. Forget about the gratuitous general release Blanche gave Trump, worth $600 million, to him and his family. Senators wanted no part of the plan, the product of a deal struck between Trump and himself, since the IRS is part of the executive branch. Senator Ted Cruz said that Republican lawmakers were “screaming” at Blanche and that the giveaway could provoke “a full-on revolt in the Senate.”
On Monday, June 1, the White House was reportedly considering backing off on the settlement in the wake of growing GOP opposition. Still, given Trump’s wild gyrations on everything from war in Iran to tariffs, there’s no telling whether the plan is dead, moribund, or about to be eclipsed by some new scheme.
Republican senators hold a razor-thin 53-47 edge, but four are on record against the settlement fund. Blanche faces a Hobson’s choice: reject the giveaway, and Trump will never give him the top job, or fire him. He could go the way of Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, or Pam Bondi in the dustbin of history. Support the steal, and he won’t be confirmed. As preached in the Sermon on the Mount, “No man can serve two masters.” Roy Cohn would have had no problem, but where is he today?
