The Attorney General Hits the Campaign Trail for GOP Candidates

The Administration Finds a New Way to Scoff at Watergate

Earlier this week, one of our TPM reporters let me know he was tuning into the White House’s press conference. I was surprised when he told me who the fill-in press secretary would be that day: Attorney General Todd Blanche.

I probably shouldn’t have been. Blanche, since winning Senate confirmation, has set about fully demolishing yet another norm: that the attorney general stay out of politics. Not only has he given a White House press briefing — in recent weeks, he’s hit the campaign trail.

The press conference this week saw Blanche affirming that Trump and his family were right on all the issues of the day.

• Trump’s castigation of Supreme Court justices after a loss as “not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” “merely a shell of their original selves”? “He is very frustrated,” the attorney general said of the president. “He has every right — and indeed he should — communicate his concerns.”
• Trump’s conspiracy theory that the Biden administration tried to kill him in Butler, Pennsylvania? Reasonable, per Blanche: The Biden administration was trying to put Trump “in prison till he dies.”
• Democrats expressing concern about AI? “Nothing but an effort to influence the midterms.”
• A Russian oligarch funding Don Jr.’s wedding? “When you say, ‘Am I investigating,’ am I investigating what? And when you say this person is a friend of Putin, I don’t even know if that’s true or not.”

Last week, Blanche spoke at the Republican midterms convention, an effort (however questionably successful) to get the base hyped to vote. On Wednesday, he campaign for former RNC head Michael Whatley, who is running for Senate in North Carolina and badly trailing former governor Roy Cooper (D). Blanche’s political campaigning pales in importance compared with the department’s aggressive prosecution of the president’s enemies — from random protesters and social media shit-stirrers to former FBI directors. But it is all of a piece.

The norm of the attorney general remaining apolitical dates back to the ’70s, Charlie Savage writes in the New York Times, when Nixon’s first attorney general, John Mitchell, ran Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 campaigns and, in between, played a central role in multiple aspects of Watergate.

Amid everything going on — Watergate would be a “12-hour news story” today, as JD Vance so memorably put it — it can feel like weak tea to talk about the vagaries of the Hatch Act, or norms of Justice Department independence. It can feel quaint to remember how Merrick Garland launched an investigation into Biden just a few short years ago. Remember the freakout that ensued when Bill Clinton and Obama attorney general Loretta Lynch chatted for 30 minutes on an airport tarmac while Hillary Clinton was under investigation? It may have set off a chain of events that brought us Trump in the first place.

Still, it’s worth keeping sight of how quickly things have changed, just to keep perspective.

When Sen. Bill Cassidy’s (R-LA) voted to confirm Blanche, he asserted that if Blanche wasn’t the Senate-confirmed attorney general, Trump would likely go find an acting attorney general who was worse. Because Blanche had been Trump’s personal lawyer, he had developed the ability to talk the president out of his worst ideas, Cassidy reasoned. “I am realistic that President Trump can be unrelenting,” he sighed. He, therefore, had not choice but to confirm Blanche, he decided.

That whole line of reasoning may be pathetic, but there’s something to it. And it’s a striking statement on where we’re at.

GOP Sticks by Florida Candidate Who Attended Neo-Nazi Rally, Spent Years Working With Neo-Confederate Group

On Monday, TPM reporter Chris Mathias revealed that Republicans’ nominee for a Florida legislature seat attended the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, part of years of activism alongside a neo-Confederate group called League of the South. Marshall Rawson’s candidacy, we found, had seemingly become a kind of cause célèbre among the furthest-right activists in American politics, who donated at least $15,000 to his campaign. Rawson had personally made it “very clear” to one former Klan lawyer “that he’s taking a stand against discrimination against white people,” the lawyer told us. 

The story was covered by The Washington Post, The New York Times, MS NOW, The New Republic, Politico, The Independent, The Guardian, and local outlets including Charlottesville Weekly, the Tampa Bay Times, and the ABC affiliate for northcentral Florida.

So, is the GOP standing by Rawson?

Yes.

• Chris reached out to GOP officials, including 22 who had endorsed Rawson, leaders in Florida who would have to work with him, and the state and national party apparatus.
• Three endorsees replied, saying that they’d stand with Rawson.
• No one else got back to us, let alone unendorse him.
• Last year, a college Republicans group at the University of Florida was disbanded after it’s members were seen giving Nazi salutes. This semester, it was reinstated. After TPM’s story appeared, Chris noted, Rawson posted a photo with the group. “Who cares about the lying media when  the largest and most active College Republican chapter in the United States is behind you!” he wrote.

Tabs

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finds that most Americans are exhausted, Gizmodo reports.

The latest iteration of the anti-Trump backlash is also nonpartisan, and targets Flock cameras, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Man of the Hour

It’s RFK Jr., speaking to the anti-vaccine group he founded, declaring that the activists in attendance have a “strong and steadfast friend at the White House.” This comes as Pennsylvania appeals to the administration for emergency help amid a worsening measles outbreak.