00:00This guy actually participated in the Epstein cover-up.
00:06Remember that there was a witness who spoke to FBI agents about having been assaulted
00:15by Donald Trump when she was about 14 years old, physically assaulted and sexually assaulted.
00:21I am here today to join the chorus of opposition to Todd Blanche's nomination as Attorney General
00:31of the United States.
00:35Things that Republicans have purported to care about are disasters with this guy.
00:43Anyway, Pam Bondi put the blame directly on Todd Blanche for the Department of Justice's
00:52foul-up with the Epstein files.
00:57That foul-up was pretty deadly serious for the women who were victims who had managed to
01:03keep that fact private until Todd Blanche and the DOJ fouled that up and put out their names,
01:11put out their addresses, put out their photographs, in some cases put out photographs with very
01:17little clothing on.
01:20Complete disruption of the lives of the victims of Epstein's depravity.
01:27Complete incompetence from a document production point of view.
01:34And on the other side, this guy actually participated in the Epstein cover-up.
01:44Remember that there was a witness who spoke to FBI agents about having been assaulted by
01:53Donald Trump when she was about 14 years old, physically assaulted and sexually assaulted.
01:59She spoke to the FBI at least four times.
02:04Those four times were recorded in FBI 302s.
02:13A 302 is the FBI name for the witness statement that the agents write up after an interview.
02:19So, four times this woman had been interviewed about what had happened to her as a girl.
02:26Three of those 302s specifically mentioned Donald Trump.
02:32In the disclosure that Todd Blanche made under the Epstein files law, the only one of the
02:41four that got disclosed was the one that didn't mention Donald Trump.
02:48That ought to be disqualifying right there.
02:52Luckily, some very sharp investigators realized through like gaps in bait stamp numbers that
03:01documents were missing and that the three 302s had not been disclosed.
03:07And so Blanche was forced to cough those up.
03:13But behind a 302 come the agent notes.
03:20And there's still 37 pages of documents related to that that are still suppressed, that are still
03:28covered up, that look to be the agent's notes, which should have been disclosed.
03:35So, the cover up continued with respect to allegations against Donald Trump.
03:40Where else did the cover up continue?
03:42Well, the Treasury Department sent to the Department of Justice what are called suspicious activity
03:47reports.
03:48A suspicious activity report is what you get when international banking transactions look
03:56like something funny is afoot.
03:58Look like there is, for instance, money laundering going on.
04:03In this case, it was money laundering and human trafficking concerns that provoked the suspicious
04:08activity reports.
04:11Well, you don't have to be a genius investigator to look at a suspicious activity report and
04:17deduce that it might have something to do with some suspicious activity.
04:20It's the title of the report for Pete's sake.
04:26Billions of dollars of transactions were behind those suspicious activity reports.
04:33How many were investigated by the Blanche Department of Justice?
04:38Zero.
04:39Turned a complete blind eye to that whole aspect of the Epstein files, even though the suspicious
04:46activity reports were right in front of them.
04:48And then he goes running down to Tallahassee to interview Epstein's comrade in crime, Ghislaine
04:59Maxwell.
05:01Did he use that interview to develop any new information, to go after people who were culpable
05:07in the Epstein files?
05:08No.
05:09He used that interview to extract exculpatory comments from her about Donald Trump.
05:16Oh, that he was a perfect gentleman.
05:19And the next thing you know, she's rewarded with a transfer to a club-fed type prison.
05:28What's the excuse for that?
05:31Oh, she was at risk.
05:33We felt she was in danger.
05:35Well, look, I've been around law enforcement for a long time.
05:38This is the first time I've ever seen a prisoner allegedly in danger be transferred to a less
05:47secure setting to solve the problem of danger.
05:53Right?
05:55You move the prisoner to a more secure setting, not to a less secure setting.
06:00It makes no sense.
06:02So, in the Epstein files, Todd Blanch's fingerprints are all over the screw-up and the cover-up.
06:10Then we move on to the slush fund and the Trump family tax fraud amnesty, which was cooked up
06:24in a deal surrounding a federal court proceeding, which was such a mess that the judge in that
06:34federal court proceeding has gone back to look at what the heck happened.
06:43She was looking at whether something happened called fraud upon the court.
06:49You probably haven't heard of fraud upon the court.
06:53It's unusually rare.
06:56It is a thermonuclear ethics accusation.
07:01We've looked.
07:02In the history of the Department of Justice, fraud on the court has not even been alleged
07:11against any senior DOJ official ever, ever.
07:16And here you have a court that opened a proceeding, an inquiry into whether or not there was fraud
07:21on the court.
07:22And that's still pending.
07:24There is still every reason to believe that Blanche may be found culpable for putting a
07:33fraud on the court together to cook up the slush fund tax amnesty scheme.
07:39That is pretty unheard of.
07:44Unfortunately, it's not uncommon in this Blanche Department of Justice.
07:51There is a cascade of criticism from federal courts about misconduct by this Department of Justice.
07:59Misconduct that is unprecedented.
08:00I will tell you I was the U.S. Attorney for the District of Rhode Island.
08:05If judges had used words like this about my attorney's conduct in their courtrooms, there
08:12would have been consequences.
08:13At a minimum, there would have been staff meetings.
08:15There could have been referrals to the Office of Professional Responsibility.
08:18There could have been apologies required to the court.
08:21There could have been a reboot internal office discipline of what's going on with this case.
08:26But when a judge says that the government's argument is disingenuous, when the judge says
08:35that the government's argument is a pretext for something else, when the judge says that
08:40the government has engaged in bad faith, each one of those is a four alarm fire word.
08:50In medicine, there are things that they call never events, things that should never happen
08:54in a hospital that you protect against.
08:56These are never event words coming from federal judges.
09:00And yet, they are commonplace in the corrupted Department of Justice run by Todd Blanche.
09:08As to his complicity in the Epstein files cover-up, I offer a letter from Epstein survivors
09:20to Senators Tillis and Cornyn and ask that that be incorporated at the end of my remarks.
09:25Without objection.
09:27With respect to the destruction of the Department of Justice that he has wrought, I would also
09:35ask that we add George Will's column called Against Todd Blanche.
09:40Without objection.
09:43And with respect to this litany of criticism of the honesty of the Blanche Department of Justice,
09:52I would like to add a ProPublica article entitled Federal Judges Chastise Trump's Justice Department
09:59for, quote, unlawful, quote, unethical, and quote, unseemly conduct.
10:04Whose first sentence begins, across the country federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers
10:09questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms.
10:21Yes.
10:22I ask unanimous consent for that.
10:23Without objection.
10:25And then this isn't just a problem in American legal communities.
10:28There is a global magazine called The Economist magazine, which, by the way, does not run liberal.
10:35It's a fairly conservative publication.
10:37The cover story in the July 18th Economist is a picture of the Department of Justice logo and the title,
10:50Degradation in Process.
10:53I ask that the Economist magazine article, there are actually two.
10:59One is the opening article that they lead with before they get to the main article.
11:04And the second is the main article.
11:06That the two articles about the degradation of the Department of Justice under Todd Blanche
11:11be added to the record as well.
11:14Without objection.
11:18Last, there's a group called Just Security, which keeps track of what goes on in federal courts.
11:24This is a binder of the cases that they have put together in which a federal judge is harshly criticizing
11:36the integrity
11:37or the competence of the Department of Justice.
11:40This binder, frankly, should not exist.
11:43This is two-sided, by the way.
11:46These many cases, it is just astounding.
11:51I'm not going to ask that this all be put into the record, but I will note that if you
11:56look at JustSecurity.org,
12:00you can look at their report published on March 19, 2026.
12:04It gets regularly updated.
12:06And if you want to go through it, you can see truly appalling criticisms by federal judges of every appointment
12:17background against incompetence and dishonesty by the Blanche Department of Justice.
12:25Where that really hits the road is with something called the presumption of regularity.
12:30You all might not know what the presumption of regularity is, but it's a benefit that the government enjoys.
12:35That, as a matter of policy, the federal judiciary has determined that the federal government is generally so honest and
12:45competent that its proceedings will be given the presumption of regularity.
12:51That the benefit of the doubt will go to the Department of Justice lawyers and to the government agencies involved.
13:00Unless the adversary can prove otherwise, courts will presume that the government has done the right thing.
13:08And over and over again, we have seen judges say that presumption of regularity is now shot because there is
13:17so much dishonesty and incompetence coming out of the Department of Justice.
13:22That is unprecedented.
13:25There are hundreds of other reasons to vote against this most reprehensible attorney general nominee in American history.
13:34But the very specific ones about his complicity in the Epstein file screw up and cover up.
13:42His being the first senior Department of Justice official in the history of the United States to face a fraud
13:48on the court inquiry.
13:50Where the judge already decided that the proceeding was a sham.
13:54And that the parties were in collusion with each other.
13:57And that the whole thing was done in bad faith.
13:59And that that's not an isolated incident.
14:02That is part of a pattern of incompetence, dishonesty out of the Department of Justice that has never before happened
14:10in the United States of America.
14:13My Republican colleagues want to get behind that.
14:16If they're cool with an attorney general who has that record, that's on you.
14:21Let's go.
14:21Let's go.
14:21Let's go.
14:21Let's go.
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