Attorney General Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump's former personal lawyer, said Sunday he's willing to break with the president on legal issues.
"There's a misnomer about President Trump, which is that he wakes up in the morning, calls me up and says, 'Todd, go prosecute this,'" Blanche said in an interview with host Shannon Bream on "Fox News Sunday." "That's absolutely not the case."
Blanche, who is entering his second week as the country's top law enforcement officer, took to interviews Sunday morning to speak on his new role, Trump's influence and priorities at the Department of Justice.
He joined "Fox News Sunday" and NBC's "Meet the Press" to push back on bipartisan concerns that he will blindly follow the White House's orders after 49 senators — two Republicans and all Democrats — voted against his confirmation.
The president's former personal lawyer maintained that Trump expects his Cabinet to disagree with him when needed.
“I think he would expect me to tell him no,” Blanche said when asked whether he could reject the president's preferred course of action if his own legal opinion differed.
Blanche rejected the idea that the president personally dictates prosecutions, but on "Meet the Press," he declined to pledge that the Justice Department would "always act independently" of the White House.
"No, I'm not going to pledge that," he told NBC's Kristen Welker. "And no attorney general should ever pledge that."
Welker then asked whether Blanche would take Trump's opinion into consideration if the president believed a particular case should be pursued or revived.
“Yes, of course,” Blanche said. “And I hope every attorney general in history would not answer that question differently.”
Blanche also argued that he would act with integrity and order his prosecutors to do the same and insisted Trump would "never ask" him to do anything deemed unethical or illegal.
"The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will," he told Welker.
Blanche has been the subject of bipartisan scrutiny due to his previous role as Trump's personal attorney.
The examination of him reflects the broader challenge Blanche faces in outlining where the administration's political priorities end and the Justice Department's legal responsibilities begin. On "Meet the Press," for instance, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries referred to Blanche's Justice Department "as a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump cartel."
from White House https://ift.tt/xgLbDvT
https://ift.tt/1lz5VUS
0 Comments