Blanche: “Not a Crime to Party with Mr. Epstein”
To defeat Todd Blanche, talk about Jeffrey Epstein.
This weekend saw a series of worrisome escalations between Israel and Iran, with the battered, beleaguered ceasefire in the region threatening to give way entirely. On Sunday, Israel carried out strikes against Hezbollah forces in Beirut, prompting Iran to fire missiles at Israel for the first time since April. President Donald Trump urged Israel not to return fire and for both sides to “stop shooting,” but Israel nevertheless responded, launching airstrikes against Iran itself early Monday morning. As we put this newsletter to bed, however, the growing tit-for-tat escalations seemed to have ended for now: Iran announced a “suspension” of further attacks within the last few hours. Happy Monday.
Join Sam Stein and Will Sommer on Substack and YouTube today at 10 a.m. EDT for MAGA Mondays.
Blanche → Epstein
by William Kristol
There are many, many Republican lawyers in America. Many, sadly, are also pro-Trump. But it is Todd Blanche who has been selected by the president to be attorney general of the United States. He has this distinction: He is the prime orchestrator and key executor of the Trump administration’s Jeffrey Epstein coverup.
As former Attorney General Pam Bondi told the House Oversight Committee recently, it was Blanche who, as deputy attorney general, “supervised [the] entire process” of dealing with the Epstein files. “He was leading the Epstein matter and the release of everything from the beginning,” she testified. Blanche has also been the most visible public defender of the coverup, and of the decision not to investigate or prosecute anyone else for crimes.
Blanche stepped boldly into the Epstein spotlight on July 24, 2025, when he traveled to Florida to interview convicted Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. The meeting was initiated by Maxwell, and she received limited immunity via a proffer agreement.
But Maxwell didn’t use her immunity as an opportunity to be more forthcoming than she’d been previously about anything to do with Epstein. As every sentient observer familiar with the Epstein case agreed, she simply continued to stonewall and lie. But Blanche wasn’t sure. He told CNN a couple months later that deciding if Maxwell was a “credible” witness is “an impossible question to answer.”
Really?
In any case, Blanche explained, “The point of the interview was not for me to pressure test every single answer she gave.”
Why not?
Because “the point of the interview was to allow her to speak, which nobody had done before.”
This was laughable. But the real point of the interview became clear a few days later, when Maxwell was moved, contrary to Bureau of Prison guidelines for sex offenders, to a comfortable minimum-security prison.
The point of both the interview and the move was to encourage Maxwell not to talk about Donald Trump—and to hold out the prospect of even more favorable treatment in the future. Since the interview, Trump has continued to refuse to rule out the possibility of a pardon or commutation for Maxwell.
Since then, Blanche has been assertively pushing back against widespread public unhappiness with the botched and selective release of the Epstein files. For example, in early February 2026, Blanche had this exchange with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham:
Ingraham: Is there any chance that any of these individuals who partied with Epstein and engaged in relations with minors will be prosecuted? Any chance?
Blanche: I’ll never say no, and we will always investigate any evidence of misconduct, but as you know, it is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. And some of these men may have done horrible things, and if we have evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But it’s also the kind of thing that the American people need to understand that it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.
“It isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.” But “Mr. Epstein” (it’s kind of striking that Blanche added the honorific) pled guilty in 2008, and then was indicted again in 2019, for horrible crimes arranged or committed or celebrated at some of those parties. The Justice Department could now be following up on the testimony of scores of survivors to finally, properly investigate those crimes and their perpetrators. But Blanche’s Justice Department hasn’t even pretended to be seeking further evidence. Blanche’s DOJ has no interest at all in investigating or prosecuting the men who have done truly horrible things. After all, “it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.”
Trump rewarded Blanche for arranging and managing the Epstein coverup. First he made Blanche acting Attorney General. Now he wants to place him in that post outright. And that requires Senate confirmation.
Which means the Senate will debate and vote. Last November, thanks to a discharge petition, and over the opposition of the Trump administration and Republican leadership, Congress was forced to engage on the Epstein matter. Opposition to legislation requiring the release of the Epstein files collapsed when the issue emerged into broad daylight, and Congress voted almost unanimously to order the Justice Department to release the files. At the time, everyone from both parties could look as if they were in favor of the truth coming out.
But now we’ve had only a partial release of those documents and no follow-up investigations. Trump has gone out of his way to punish Republican critics of his administration’s Epstein coverup. Republicans have been happy to avoid further engaging on the issue.
But thanks to Trump’s nomination of Blanche, there is a chance to force a real public debate, with real Senate votes, on the Epstein coverup.
That is not what Blanche wants. In early April, shortly after becoming acting attorney general, Blanche told Fox News, “And so I think that to the extent that the Epstein files was a part of the past year of this Justice Department, it should not be a part of anything going forward.”
But the Epstein coverup should be part, a key part, of one thing going forward: It should be a key part of the upcoming debate on Blanche’s confirmation as attorney general. The Blanche confirmation fight can bring the Epstein coverup back into the spotlight this summer. His nomination can be turned into a referendum on the coverup by the Trump administration, and by the entire political class, of Epstein and his co-conspirators and clients.
The vote on Blanche can become, it should become, a vote on Epstein.
Vance Never Met a Racial Controversy He Didn’t Like
by Cathy Young
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who used D-Day commemorations in Normandy to lecture Europe on resisting a new “invasion,” wasn’t the only Trump administration figure to annoy our allies with anti-immigration harangues in recent days. On Friday, the office of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer criticized those who would “interfere in our democracy” by exploiting the murder of 18-year-old British student Henry Nowak after his killer, Vickrum Digwa—a Sikh of Indian background—was sentenced to 21 years to life. That was a veiled swipe at Vice President JD Vance, who jumped into the controversy over the police response to Nowak’s fatal stabbing last December with a post saying Nowak would be alive if “European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants.”
The outrage over the circumstances of Nowak’s death is legitimate. Digwa stabbed Nowak multiple times after a minor (non-racial) verbal altercation. But it was Digwa and his brother, not Nowak, who called the police to report a violent racial assault. When the police arrived on the scene, they initially dismissed Nowak’s pleas that he’d been stabbed. The victim, bleeding internally and barely conscious, was handcuffed and arrested for assault; only then, after a cursory check, did the police call an ambulance and try CPR. Digwa was arrested a few minutes later, and Nowak was soon declared dead. (I discuss the incident in more detail in an article in Persuasion.)
Though the pathologist on the case declared that Nowak could not have been saved, it’s still horrifying that one of the last things he heard was “You are under arrest.” Many people, including commentators who are not on the right, think this appalling police negligence may have stemmed at least partly from hypersensitivity about racism based on an “overcorrection” in response to legitimate concerns about biased policing. Or maybe, as conservative British analyst Andrew Fox argues in Quillette, it was lazy assumptions based on the Digwas’ police call (how often does the murderer call the cops, after all?); the belief that, as the Digwas had claimed, the man on the ground was a violent drunk; and the lack of visible stab wounds or blood. There is now a well-warranted official investigation.
But far-right narratives pushed by politicians like Nigel Farage and media outlets like the GB News TV channel have promoted a drastically distorted account in which “woke” antiwhite racism caused the police to let Nowak die in a pool of his own blood. These hyperbolic accusations have already led to violent protests against the police and harassment toward Sikhs. Nowak’s family has asked that their tragedy not become a cause of division.
Enter Vance, not only denouncing the uncaring authorities but blaming Nowak’s death on immigration. Presumably, this means that Digwa, whose father is British-born and whose mother immigrated legally from India thirty years ago, should not have been in England. (One may only wonder what Second Lady Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrants, thinks.) Presumably, Vance also means non-white immigration, since Nowak himself was the son of an immigrant from Poland. It’s repulsive, bigoted demagoguery, all the more vile since it exploits an awful tragedy to praise the Trump administration’s efforts to stop “mass migration.” But what else is new?
AROUND THE BULWARK
Soldiers Need Clarity From the President... When the commander-in-chief speaks, the troops—and our allies—listen, MARK HERTLING writes.
Tonight! The Bulwark Book Club kicks off with MARK HERTLING joining MONA CHAREN at 7 p.m. Eastern to discuss If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal. This is exclusively for Bulwark+ members on Substack and YouTube. Join now.
What a Russian Army Collapse Might Look Like… The Ukrainians are trying to break the Russian military—and they just might do it, argues BRYNN TANNEHILL.
North Korea’s New Nuclear Doctrine… On Shield of the Republic, ERIC EDELMAN and ELIOT COHEN discuss the latest jackassery before pivoting to the war with Iran and under-reported nuclear developments on the Korean Peninsula.
Quick Hits
PRESIDENTIAL HISSY FIT: Donald Trump’s done a lot of combative press interviews over the years, but it’s been a while since he ragequit one. In a Meet the Press interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker aired yesterday—taped in a barn in Wisconsin and frequently interrupted by torrential rain—the president gradually melted down over his stolen-election claims, insisting that the 2020 election had been rigged against him, that January 6th rioters who pled guilty to assaulting cops had actually been innocent, and that Democrats are rigging another primary election in California as we speak.1 As Welker repeatedly pressed him to give evidence for any of these claims, Trump repeatedly dodged: “There’s tremendous evidence. There’s nothing but evidence. . . . All I have to do is look. . . . I listen to people.” He got madder and madder until: “You’re a one-sided crooked network,” he spat. “Sorry. Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling. Have a good time.”
It was all the base-pleasing hits he’s played a thousand times before: The elections are crooked, the press is crooked, everybody’s crooked except Donald J. Trump. Another major interview, in other words, in which Trump failed to do a thing to neutralize the enormous hole he’s dug himself with voters ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.
DON’T TELL ME PEOPLE ARE MAD ABOUT THE ECONOMY: There were many other interesting moments in Trump’s Welker interview, but here’s another that stood out: As Welker repeatedly asked Trump what his message was to farmers who have been hammered by the economic effects of the Iran War, Trump repeatedly refused to give them a message at all, simply insisting that “nobody’s been better to farmers” and “I love the farmers and the farmers love me.”
It was a striking illustration of Trump’s bizarre unwillingness to engage on one of his key negative issues: voters’ growing fury about the cost of living in America.
Meanwhile, anti-Trump groups are gearing up to turn the heat up on Trump on the issue ahead of the midterms. This morning, our friends at Home of the Brave launched a new ad blitz in sixteen states highlighting spiking prices in essentials like gas and groceries, including a faintly horrifying AI spoof of Wal-Mart’s old price-rollback ads, which you can watch here.
Cheap Shots
This is starting to happen any time Republicans lose any election anywhere, as Trump grows more crazily convinced that he and his candidates would win every election everywhere if the votes were counted fairly. Right now, the president and his allies are incensed over the Los Angeles mayoral election, in which Republican meme candidate Spencer Pratt failed to make it into the top-two runoff.
“it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein.”
Translation: Donald partied with Jeffrey.
Blanche: "I’ll never say no, and we will always investigate any evidence of misconduct, but as you know, it is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. And some of these men may have done horrible things, and if we have evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But it’s also the kind of thing that the American people need to understand that it isn’t a crime to party with Mr. Epstein."
< Tim rubs his eyes >
The one thing I'm grateful for during these last 11 years is people have revealed their true selves. For some, their ambition overrides their moral compass (assuming of course they had one to begin with), and this is the case for Blanche. He knows deep down that his boss is a moral degenerate of the highest order, and yet because he desperately wants to be AG, he's willing to do **anything** to get there. There's a high probability that Trump had sexual encounters with underage girls, which is why he appointed his own lawyer to acting AG in order to bury the evidence.
Speaking personally, I believe the country deserves the embarrassment and shame that comes with this. The electorate made an amoral, corrupt bargain with Donald Trump, and because the electorate is largely stupid, it didn't occur to them that Trump would renege on that bargain.
Surprise, motherfuckers.