Does Todd Blanche Have a Red Line?

<div><div><div><div><p>The acting attorney general is showcasing his willingness to intimidate reporters whose revelations have upset the president.</p></div></div><div><figure><div><img alt="Todd Blanche" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/thumbor/7v9ycmDws8jeZDOaVfgjWvzbIxw=/0x0:28…; width="960"></div><figcaption>Al Drago / Bloomberg / Getty</figcaption></figure></div></div><div><p><small><i>This is an edition of The</i> Atlantic<i> Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. </i></small><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/sign-up/atlantic-daily/"><i><sm… up for it here.</small></i></a></p><div><p><small><em>Updated at 10:27 a.m. on July 14, 2026</em></small></p></div><p>On Wednesday, Todd Blanche will head to Capitol Hill for hearings on his nomination to be U.S. attorney general. Usually these hearings are a chance for senators to get a sense of how a nominee would approach the job, but Blanche has already had a 100-day tryout as acting attorney general, which removes some of the suspense.</p><p>Although not <i>all </i>of the suspense. If Blanche loses a single vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee would deadlock and sink his nomination. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/lindsey-graham/687893/">Senat… Lindsey Graham’s death</a> leaves an opening on the committee, and who will fill it is not yet known, although it’s likely they would vote in favor of Blanche. The vote that will receive the most attention is that of Thom Tillis, the North Carolina Republican who has emerged as a notable critic of Donald Trump since announcing his retirement.</p><p>Tillis’s actions have not always been as bold as his rhetoric. <a href="https://x.com/mkraju/status/2062548831934312947">He said last month</a> that “the key for Todd, or anybody going through Judiciary Committee, is being pretty tight on January 6.” One might imagine that Blanche’s involvement in Trump’s $1.8 billion fund for political allies, including January 6ers, would be an issue, but <a href="https://x.com/LauraEWeiss16/status/2066920588019442134">Tillis apparently does not</a>. A federal judge today issued a scathing finding that the lawsuit that produced the settlement was improper, because Trump was effectively negotiating against himself. <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.706172/gov.us… ruling</a>, which singles out Blanche, should be good fodder for this week’s hearings.</p><p>If Blanche clears the committee, he will also have to get a majority of the full Senate, where he has only a little more margin for error. South Carolina’s governor today said that he would name Graham’s sister to fill the seat, but until she is sworn in, and as long as Mitch McConnell is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/07/mitch-mcconnell-health/687… out of commission</a>, the GOP has just a 51–47 edge in the chamber.</p><p>For most Republican senators, this will be a straightforward <i>yea</i>: The president’s a Republican; Blanche is his nominee, and so they’ll vote for him. During his time as acting attorney general, Blanche has demonstrated the same blind loyalty: If Trump, who previously retained him as a personal attorney, tells him to do something, he does it. The past few days have shown why that’s a dangerous disposition for an attorney general—and especially perilous to free speech and a free press. Any GOP member open to considering Blanche’s nominations on its merits should pay close attention.</p><p>Last week, Trump departed from a summit in Turkey not on his <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/05/trump-qatar-pla… new airborne conflict of interest</a> but on one of the older planes that also serve as Air Force One. <i>The</i> <i>New York Times </i><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/us/politics/new-air-force-one-defens…; that this was because the new plane, given by Qatar, lacks the same “defensive countermeasures” of the older plane, including “advanced antimissile capabilities.” Over the weekend, the <i>Times </i>revealed that Blanche’s Justice Department had <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/business/media/new-york-times-trump-… subpoenas</a> to four of the paper’s reporters, dispatching federal agents to some of their homes. The administration wants to compel them to testify about how they learned of the security vulnerabilities.</p><p>This is only the latest in a string of attempts to squeeze reporters. In January, when Blanche was deputy attorney general, the FBI raided the home of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/01/14/washington-… <i>Washington Post </i>reporter</a>, searching for evidence in an investigation into a contractor suspected of leaking. Two judges have ruled that the government <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/05/04/post-report… search the data</a> and criticized its approach. In May, the department subpoenaed the records of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/05/12/justice-dep… Street Journal </i>reporters</a>, trying to find the source of leaks about the planning of Trump’s war in Iran, and another <i>Post </i>reporter who had written about the takeover of Venezuela. In June, DOJ <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/23/us/subpoenas-wall-street-journal-was… the subpoenas</a>. (FBI Director Kash Patel has also sued <i>The Atlantic </i>and my colleague Sarah Fitzpatrick over <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/04/kash-patel-fbi-director-dr… reporting on his leadership at the bureau</a>, and reportedly <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/kash-patel-fitzpatrick-fbi-in… a criminal investigation</a> into her.)</p><p>These are classic cases of attacking, or at least threatening to imprison, the messenger. A Justice Department spokesperson <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/business/media/new-york-times-trump-…; that “reporters are not the targets, those leaking classified information are,” but in practice this is a meaningless distinction. If reporters give up their sources, they will violate agreements they made, which will make it harder for them to obtain information relevant to the public in the future, but if they refuse, they could be fined or sent to jail.</p><p>The driving force behind these subpoenas is Trump. <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/11/politics/trump-doj-subpoenas-iran-war-le… reported</a> in May that the president wrote <span>Treason</span> in Sharpie on a note to Blanche with a stack of articles about the Iran war. Soon thereafter, DOJ issued the subpoenas. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/us/politics/white-house-patel-invest… <i>Times </i>also reported</a> that a livid Trump summoned Patel to the White House to oversee an investigation into how the information about Air Force One had leaked, leading to the latest subpoenas. In the past, top Justice Department officials have resigned or threatened to resign over political pressure from the White House—including cases far less direct than the president instructing the attorney general to subpoena reporters over stories that made him look bad. But Blanche hasn’t just complied; he’s been happy to publicly defend these moves.</p><p>After the <i>WSJ</i> subpoenas became public, Blanche <a href="https://x.com/DAGToddBlanche/status/2054197699486908639?lang=en">posted on X</a> that “prosecuting leakers who share our nation’s secrets with reporters, in turn risking our national security and the lives of our soldiers, is a priority for this administration.” The idea that internal dissent over the war represents a threat to soldiers is difficult to take seriously. Even harder to believe was a <a href="https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-administration-subpoenas-new-… that Blanche made to journalists last month</a>. “We very much value and appreciate the role that reporters play,” he said. “I have a similar important role to make sure that people who are entrusted with our nation’s secrets do what they’re supposed to do with that information which, spoiler alert, means not sharing it with reporters.” The administration’s approach suggests that it is more concerned about embarrassment than security concerns, and more concerned with the optics of the leaks than the substance.</p><p>Balancing national-security concerns with press freedom always presents difficult trade-offs, but faced with a choice between disappointing the political aims of the president he serves and stifling the free press, Blanche has shown that he won’t hesitate to choose the latter. My colleagues <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/06/trump-justice-department-barr… Chait</a> and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/04/trump-pam-bondi-justice-depar… Jurecic</a> have outlined some of the reasons that the nomination is troubling, but this week, Blanche’s actions are making the case just as clearly.</p><p><b>Related:</b></p><p><strong>Here are four new stories from <i>The Atlantic</i>:</strong></p><p><strong>Today’s News</strong></p><div><ol><li>A federal judge ruled that the Trump administration pursued President Trump’s <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/judge-says-trump-administ… against the IRS in “bad faith” to “manipulate the judicial process,”</a> ordering sanctions against several people involved, including Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and referred one of Trump’s attorneys to the Florida bar association. In the order, the judge said the case was designed to legitimize agreements granting Trump-related entities and people immunity rather than to resolve a genuine legal dispute.</li> <li>The United States and Iran <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2026/07/13/world/iran-war-us-trump-hormuz"… another round of strikes overnight</a>. Trump announced that he was reinstating the U.S. naval blockade of Iranian ports and proposing a 20 percent fee on cargo passing through the Strait of Hormuz.</li> <li>An ICE officer <a href="https://apnews.com/article/ice-shooting-maine-immigration-dhs-f26f8c225… shot a 26-year-old man</a> during a deportation operation in Biddeford, Maine, after he tried to drive his vehicle toward officers, authorities say, marking the agency’s second use of deadly force in a week.</li></ol></div><p><strong>Dispatches</strong></p><div></div><p><em><a href="https://link.theatlantic.com/click/29767897.0/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cudGhlYXRsY… all of our newsletters here.</a></em></p><p><strong>Evening Read</strong></p><div><figure><img alt="Color photo of Roman interior with ornate door flanked by large sconces opened to inner room." src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/img/2026/07/07-2/original.jpg&quot; width="321"><figcaption>The Oratorio del Gonfalone in Rome Benedetta Ristori for The Atlantic</figcaption></figure></div><p>How the Elite See Rome</p><p><i>By Cullen Murphy</i></p><div><blockquote><p>A famous entertainer would like to have the Colosseum to herself for a small evening event—anything you can do? A visitor on a layover hopes to see a privately owned Caravaggio behind the walls of a Roman palazzo—what about tonight? A traveler wants to make railway excursions from Rome in a train car with no other passengers—can that be arranged?</p> <p>Fulvio De Bonis finds a way to say yes to challenges such as these, which fall somewhere between logistical quandary and diplomatic démarche.</p></blockquote></div><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/rome-elite-tourism-imago-a… the full article.</a></p><p><b>More From <em>The Atlantic</em></b></p><p><b>Culture Break</b></p><div><figure><img alt="A man with a close-shaven head looking left, in a white soccer jersey, against a blurred background" src="https://cdn.theatlantic.com/media/newsletters/2026/07/_preview_90/origi…; width="800"><figcaption>United International Pictures / Everett Collection</figcaption></figure></div><p><b>Watch. </b>A new art film on the great midfielder Zinedine Zidane is being shown in the basement theater of New York’s Guggenheim Museum. Sebastian Smee watched it—and learned something about <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/07/world-cup-spectacle-zidane-… heroism and pathos of being human</a>.</p><p><b>Examine.</b> The most famous AI writing tic is <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/ai-chatbot-writing-tic-n… the most mysterious</a>, Will Oremus writes.</p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/free-daily-crossword-puzzle/">Play our daily crossword.</a></p><p><small><em>This article has been updated to clarify that Trump departed a summit in Turkey on a plane given by Qatar but did not return home in it.</em></small></p><p><small><i>Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.</i></small></p><p><small><em>When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting </em>The Atlantic<em>.</em></small></p></div></div>