Attorney General Todd Blanche was confronted on Thursday about whether he could rule out any effort by the federal government to block elections from being certified.
He refused to commit do this — swearing that he didn't have any plans to interfere with elections, but saying under some unspecified "doomsday scenario" he just might.
"Can you rule out any actions from the Justice Department in terms of certification process of states?" asked a reporter. "Is there any scenario in which DOJ would weigh in on that certification process or try to block states from certifying?"
"I mean, is there any scenario, yes, of course there are scenarios we could all come up with hypothetically, you know, some doomsday scenario, for example, right?" said Blanche. "I don't think it's proper to make any kind of conclusory statement on what's going to happen in the future, because I have no idea what's going on in the future."
"It's not DOJ's intention to, and it is never our intention to improperly interfere with elections or the state confirmation process or certification process, but, you know, to say there's no circumstances that we would ever do that, of course I'm not going to say that," Blanche added. "But am I planning my days around the election to be somewhere to not certify? Of course not, no, not at all."
A few days prior, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon gave a similar hedging answer when asked by CBS News' Lesley Stahl, saying, “Well, I don’t know what is going to happen, but I can tell you that absent some shocking contingency that is unexpected, there should be no interruption in the usual course of counting and certifying the results in the states.”