Acting U.S. attorney general Todd Blanche on Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
Photo: Sha Hanting/China News Service/Getty Images
At first glance, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, appeared to emerge from his confirmation hearing Wednesday relatively unscathed. For five hours, he contended with the expected adversarial questioning from Senate Democrats and largely friendly treatment from Republicans.
But a potential (though unlikely) Republican holdout on the Senate Judiciary Committee — North Carolina senator Thom Tillis — signaled that his support for Blanche’s promotion was contingent upon one thing: Blanche finally meeting with survivors of financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The meeting took place on Thursday as Blanche met with a group of Epstein accusers for more than an hour at the Justice Department headquarters. Initial accounts suggest that the sit-down went poorly.
One survivor, Annie Farmer, said in a statement that finally meeting with Blanche made her “even more confident in urging senators to vote against his confirmation as the United States’ Attorney General.”
“I found him abrasive, condescending, and intentionally noncommittal to survivors — a marked contrast to his public testimony during his confirmation hearing. While quick to point to the failures of previous administrations, he refused to take accountability for mistakes made under his own leadership,” Farmer wrote.
Farmer, who testified in 2019 that Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell sexually assaulted her at Epstein’s New Mexico ranch, said Blanche “would not commit” to an investigation into why her sister Maria Farmer’s 1996 report to the FBI about Epstein was never addressed. “His evasiveness felt like a deliberate attempt to claim the Attorney General’s office is powerless in this matter. By passing the buck once again, he is leaving survivors trapped in the same endless loop of searching for answers and receiving none,” she said in the statement.
Liz Stein, another Epstein survivor, had similar takeaways from the meeting. “It had absolutely nothing to do with us, and it had everything to do with Blanche checking a box so that he could get a promotion,” she told MS NOW in an interview. “It was demoralizing, to say the least.”
Stein continued, “If he offered almost anything, I think that we would have been happy that he just offered us something. But he completely talked around questions. He didn’t give transparent answers. He didn’t give us any promises as far as following up on investigative leads. He had no real answers for the Ghislaine Maxwell transfer and no real explanation for the improper redactions.”
The family of Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers, who died by suicide last year, told CNN they went into the meeting with the intentions of trying to work with Blanche. Sky Roberts, Giuffre’s brother, said he asked Blanche what he needed to find investigative leads and raised his sister’s accusations against Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, the member of the British royal family.
“Virginia provided testimony and she provided evidence. Is that not an investigative lead? He said, ‘Well, he won’t cooperate with me.’ And he also said that, ‘Virginia’s not here, so I can’t use that testimony.’ And so, it just felt like he wasn’t willing to work with us,” Roberts said.
Speaking to reporters, Blanche acknowledged the tense nature of the meeting. “It wasn’t all cordial,” Blanche said, per the Associated Press. “Because there’s something that they want that I don’t think I can give them, which is some form of justice. And I want to be able to give justice in the form of prosecutions, and maybe we can do a prosecution at some point.”
But even as Epstein survivors appear dissatisfied with Blanche, it doesn’t appear likely that the meeting will derail his nomination to become President Donald Trump’s next permanent attorney general. Tillis, whose vote will be crucial for Blanche to advance through committee, seemed pleased that Blanche took the meeting, even despite the reports that followed.
“I commend Todd Blanche for doing what all his predecessors over the last two decades never did: meet with the victims of Jeffery Epstein’s horrific crimes. I appreciate his willingness to directly engage and listen to them,” Tillis said in a statement.
Republican senator John Cornyn of Texas, who has expressed a hesitancy in voting for Blanche, still appeared undecided after his questioning of the nominee on Wednesday due to concerns over whether the Justice Department’s controversial weaponization fund is truly dead. “I continue to have some concerns, but I’m not going to make any decisions at this point. I’m going to wait until we actually vote on a confirmation in a week or so,” he told CNN. But, over the years, Cornyn has largely been a reliable vote for Trump-backed legislation and nominees.
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