Newly minted Attorney General Todd Blanche is trying to walk a fine line, former White House pardon attorney Liz Oyer told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace — and ethics is nowhere near it.
That, she said, was made clear by his newest interview over the weekend in which he refused to commit to running the law with independence.
Blanche, noted Wallace to Oyer, "almost didn't getconfirmed because Trump hadasked him to codify immunity and impunity forever from the IRS forever ... why are they still lying and trying to be both things?"
The key, replied Oyer, is that "Blanche is really trying to kind of put on a split screen of personalities. The speech that he gave inside the Justice Department the day that he was sworn in took a very conciliatory tone. He tried to get the buy-in of the career workforce, which he will need to try to get any work done."
However, "immediately after," he went on Meet the Press, "and he was at that point performing for the president, not for the career workforce," said Oyer. "And he said, of course, Donald Trump has every right to do whatever he wants with the Justice Department."
Blanche, she continued, is a "true believer" in unchecked executive power, genuinely committed to the idea Trump can do whatever he wants with enforcement of the law. In his mind, "it is the prerogative of the president to run the Justice Department to bring the cases that he wants to bring, regardless of whether the facts and the evidence are there to support him."
"The idea that Blanche got up there and said with a straight face that Donald Trump would never ask him to do anything unethical or illegal is really just incredible," she added. "I mean, Todd Blanche would not know ethics if they hit him in the face. At this point, this is the most corrupt, most lawless Justice Department. And Todd Blanche is okay with that. And that is the fundamental problem we have here."