BREAKING: Trump’s attorney general pick is in TROUBLE as a second Republican senator announces she will vote NO!
Donald Trump’s attempt to install Todd Blanche as attorney general is hanging by a thread after Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski announced Friday that she will vote against his confirmation, warning that the DOJ needs someone “willing to check the worst impulses” of the Trump administration.
Murkowski joins Susan Collins as the second Republican to oppose Blanche. With every Democrat expected to vote no and Sen. Mitch McConnell inhabiting a still-undetermined astral plane, just one more Republican defection could sink Trump’s nominee.
“The country needs an Attorney General who will check the worst impulses of this administration,” Murkowski stated. ” … I simply do not have confidence that will be the case.”
Murkowski said she has grown increasingly alarmed by the “politicization” and “even weaponization” of the Justice Department under Trump, pointing specifically to its handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files and a proposed $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund that she dismissed as a “slush fund.
There is a third Republican vote in play that can sink Blanche for good. Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, whom Trump has worked to drive out of the Senate, refused Thursday to say whether he would support Blanche.
Trump somehow failed to sway Murkowski to his side when he bizarrely lashed out at the Alaska senator in an interview, telling Punchbowl News, saying “Murkowski, I was against … I’m against Murkowski,” Trump, adding a trademark flourish: “I do more for Alaska than any president in history. No president’s done for Alaska what I’ve done.”
Blanche was already facing Republican concerns over the $1.8 billion fund and his handling of the Epstein files, including a meeting one survivor described as neither “productive” nor “substantive.”
Blanche isn’t just another Trump nominee. He was Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney before becoming his chief lieutenant at the Justice Department, ready to wield tremendous power on behalf of Trump’s agenda as AG.
Blanche going down would disrupt an aggressive Justice Department agenda central to Trump’s immigration crackdown, cost him one of his most trusted personal loyalists, and deliver the extraordinary political humiliation of a Republican-controlled Senate defying his will.
Murkowski has now put Trump one vote closer to exactly that nightmare.- Occupy Democrats