Dems blew their big chance to nail Trump to the wall at Blanche hearing: legal expert

President Donald Trump’s pick for attorney general, his former attorney Todd Blanche, has been widely criticized for admitting that he primarily views himself as Trump’s attorney and not doing enough for the victims of Trump’s longtime friend, the late Jeffrey Epstein. Yet even as Blanche gets in trouble for things such as saying Epstein’s victims should “do the legwork” for prosecuting Epstein and his associates, conservative critics of Trump have another observation — namely, that Democrats are not doing nearly enough to hold Trump and the other Epstein associates legally accountable.

“That's where Chuck Schumer, you know, should be choosing people to be on that committee who have that skill set, right?” Andrew Weissmann, a New York University law professor, explained on a podcast for The Bulwark posted on Sunday. Weissmann referred to how the New York senator and Senate Minority Leader has refrained from assigning lawmakers with a habit of asking tough questions to interrogate Blanche. “I mean, you have a bunch of people to choose from. And so that's where, you know, people — I feel like they don't do the hard work — but I agree with you.”

He added, “The other thing is, you know, get the person talking. You shouldn't be afraid of that. If you are right, and the whole thing is not a ‘gotcha,’ it's not a sort of game — this is where I think it helps that I was mainly a prosecutor.”

Weissmann said that, for example, a Democratic senator could have asked Blanche after the latter said he took responsibility for mistakes in producing the Epstein documents, “Just say, ‘Mr. Blanche, what's the first time you have ever said that? Isn't it today? Prior to today, wasn't your position that everything was fine?’” He added that they could similarly hold Blanche accountable for botching the investigations into the ICE murders of Alex Pretti and Renee Good.

“The victims have come out from that meeting and said one of the things Todd Blanche said at that meeting was, well, you know, you need to go to the FBI and talk to them — which, by the way, point one, they have,” Weissmann pointed out. “They're like, ‘What are you talking about? We've already been to the FBI.’ And then he says, well, the reason you need to do that is that he, as the acting attorney general, cannot open an investigation.”

Weissmann’s observations were similar to those of Longwell, who shared his views that Democrats have not been aggressive enough in holding Republicans accountable for their actions regarding Trump and Epstein.

“The word I think you're looking for is ‘conviction’ — or maybe you're not, but it's the word I was looking for. I don't think you can sort of prosecute a case here, whether it's to the public or to actually move [something],” Longwell told Weissmann. “I think I came from the place that I'm not sure it's realistic that you're going to get the Republicans to vote against him. And so, for me, I was like, how do you — how do you at least make this about an issue that's going to be really complicated for him? And how do you get answers on Epstein, and sort of push that back into the news? You never know.”

This was similar to Weissmann’s complaint about Democrats in the Senate and how they handled Blanche.

“I think the more interesting question is not so much how did Blanche do in terms of his tone, but rather, how did the Democratic senators do in terms of their tone?” Weissmann said. “And that, to me, from the moment it began with Senator Durbin, who is obviously a lovely person, a smart person, and I think trying to be fair and wasn't engaged in a ‘gotcha’ — and that's true for many of the senators, you know — but there was zero sense of passion. There was zero sense of wrong. And, by the way, I'm not saying that you have to be rude or vitriolic. I'm just saying there was — I can understand why young people could be totally turned off by politics seeing that, and this sort of sense of the game that's played.”