Committee Chairman U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) delivers statement in a Senate Health, Ed., Labor, and Pensions Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., July 15, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) has become the deciding factor on a nominee for President Donald Trump.
On Friday morning, Cassidy announced he will support Todd Blanche for the attorney general spot.
Cassidy said that while he has a "history" with Trump, he didn't take that into consideration.
Trump has said that if he lost the vote, he'd keep Blanche in the office anyway as an "acting" attorney general until he can have another vote in 2027.
Trump and Cassidy have been on shaky ground since Cassidy voted to approve an impeachment trial for Trump in the Senate in 2021. Trump remembered, supporting another Republican running against Cassidy in the GOP primary. He even brought it up in an interview with Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman that aired on Friday. The result is that the longtime U.S. senator was voted out of office.
“I’ve got to be convinced that he is an attorney general who just happens to have once been President Trump’s personal attorney, as opposed to President Trump’s personal attorney who is now the attorney general. I think there’s a big difference between the two,” Cassidy said Wednesday on The Briefing with Steve Scully.
For the past several weeks, Cassidy has spoken about the main issues he has with approving Blanche to run the Justice Department.
First, Cassidy said in an interview that he's not happy about the Justice Department being weaponized against Trump's foes.
“I am very concerned about so-called lawfare — people being prosecuted not for a valid reason beyond somebody in high office being angry at them,” Cassidy told Scully.
Second, Cassidy has made it clear that he does not support the "settlement" that Trump made with the Justice Department and the IRS that would protect Trump, his family and all of his businesses from being audited by the IRS ever again.
In his speech, Cassidy said, "Mr. Blanche showed poor judgment in approving the anti-weaponization slush fund and exempting the president from IRS audits. No American should be unfairly targeted by the law. No American should be above the law."
Speaking to reporters in May at the announcement of the fund, Cassidy said, “I don’t actually see any legal precedent for that. We are a nation of laws, you can’t just make up things whole-piece. Somebody explained it to me this way, an attorney. … It is as if somebody sued themselves and agreed upon a settlement with themselves that’s going to be funded by the rest of us. If that’s the case: What?!"
Cassidy went on to say that after spending the past several months campaigning, he found that Americans were more concerned about making "ends meet, not about putting a slush fund together without a legal precedent. We’re a nation of laws. If there needs to be a settlement, let’s consider it and Congress should come together and decide on that.”