参议院确认特朗普前辩护律师托德·布兰奇为司法部长

Back to that breaking news now out of Washington DC. The senate confirming president Donald Trump's pick for attorney general Todd Blanche. We're gonna go now to Laura Davison. She's Bloomberg News Washington deputy bureau chief. Laura, late night for our colleagues on the hill before everybody tries to skip town. This looks like when I went to bed last night, it wasn't going to happen possibly. And then you had, but you had Bill Cassidy who had been, like, the big holdout coming out and changing his mind kind of yesterday, and then it was a holding pattern, and then all of a sudden, this got pushed through this morning.

Can you walk us through how this came about? Yes. This is how congress, frequently works is there's a whole lot of nothing. And then suddenly, you know, in the wee hours of the morning, they're able to to get the votes and push something across the finish line once senate leaders have exhausted everyone, and they're, you know, agreeing to vote for things. So this is really, you know, sort of a remarkable end to a weeks long saga.

If you had, you know, multiple senators coming out and expressing some concerns about Todd Blanche and also just how Trump is influencing the justice department, particularly this $1,800,000,000, quote, anti weaponization fund that would have gone to support January 6 insurrectionists and other allies of the president, as well as the the the president being able to cut a deal with the IRS to save himself from any tax audits.

So, you know, they were able to get some concessions. You know, some Republicans were able to get some concessions from the justice department that really limited the scope of that tax deal as well as essentially tabling, killing off that that anti weaponization fund. You still had two senators who said no way, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski expressing broader concerns. But the last vote, what everyone was waiting for, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, he is a lame duck senator.

Trump essentially opposed him in his primary, and he is will be leaving congress next year. Everyone was watching him. He came out on the senate floor yesterday and said, look. You know, I, have some, problems with how the justice department is being run, but I think that Todd Blanche is going to be better than any other, candidate that Trump is gonna put forward. And so, therefore, I'm gonna go ahead and give him my support and vote yes.

Let me play a bit of that sound from that speech. Again, this was highly anticipated given that Murkowski defected, Collins defected, what was Bill Cassidy going to do. Let's let's play a listen of what he had to play a little bit of what he had to say here on the senate floor. Mister Blanche is not perfect, and he will tell you this. But the choice is not between perfection and mister Blanche. It is between mister Blanche and another acting attorney general who may not run the department effectively under president Trump and who, indeed, may not be as good as mister Blanche.

Laura, let's pick that apart a little bit there. Not not a bringing endorsement there. The devil you know is really the endorsement I would want going into a new job. Sorry. Go ahead, David. What do you what do you make of of what the senator had to say to the rationale as he presented it there on the senate floor? Well, I think you just have to take a look at some recent history. If you look at, you know, who Trump has talked about having a top that the justice department in the past, his first pick back when he was recently reelected in in 2024, he wanted Matt Gates, the really embattled and and scandal plagued member of congress who had had facing all sorts of allegations of, you know, underage sex charges and and a whole bunch of problems.

That really got a very quick swift no from senate Republicans. That's when he pivoted to Pam Bondi. Of course, now Blanche will be replacing Bondi. But I think, you you, you know, in in that speech, Cassidy mentioned that he thinks that, Todd Blanche will be a hands on administrator and be you know, sort sort of be able to run a very, very large department with thousands and thousands of lawyers and that he's not worried sort of broadly about mister Blanche's character.

Whereas he, you know, sort of suggested that there would be other candidates that the president might be interested in who he would have more concerns with. You mentioned that, what there were these two big concerns, and one of them was this anti weaponization fund. And Blanche kind of explained what he did. He kind of wrote a memo or a promise that it's gone away, but my understanding is it's not really binding. Right?

So it was enough it was enough to get him over the line, but can he change his mind? Yes. This is really kind of the the legal question surrounding this. What some members of congress wanted is is this written into law saying that this could never, come back up again. Instead, what they got is sort of, you know, sort of a memo from the justice department saying this is this is going away. But this is you know, continues to to be, concerning to to some members of congress that this could, you know, come back up in future deals.

You know, as we've seen, you know, Trump, time and time again, you know, has has said he didn't really want this to go away even though his his allies and aids were telling him that this was, going to be sort of sacrificed, you know, for the broader good of getting his attorney general pick across the line. You know, we've seen this on on a whole broad range of issues where Trump says, you know, he he's moving on, but then suddenly brings it up.

We've seen this with a reflecting pool. We've seen this with the ballroom of that he continues to fight, on some of these personal priorities for him. I don't think that what we saw last night meets the strict definition of a voterama. We had Stephen Dennis, our colleague, on a few weeks back, and we talked we talked about that with him. But there was a string of legislation that the senate dealt with before departing Washington yesterday.

Another had to do with spending, and I wanna ask you about that, Laura, if I could. I mean, customarily, or at least in recent memory, there have been a lot of these kind of last minute spending bills that have been quite acrimonious. They've led to government shutdowns. What was passed, I think, was it '90 to six last night, was not that. It it didn't seem like it went down to the wire in the same way that it has in in the past.

What did the senate accomplish in in that regard? What does it mean for the fall as we look ahead to the midterms in terms of how the government is funded? Yeah. So one thing passed is what's called a continuing resolution or a CR. This is essentially a stop gap government funding bill to keep the government open, past the deadline when, current funding is set to expire at the end of September. This would keep the government open until December 11.

So essentially kicks the can down the road beyond, the midterm elections, which no one wants to see a a shutdown happen during then. What they haven't resolved yet is they haven't come to agreement with the house. So good points for them doing their advanced reading, but they have not reached the advance the group stage project of this. So when the the when the senate comes back on September 14, I note, they have just about two weeks to work with the house to get a bill passed.

So there's still a chance of a shutdown. Chances ticked down significantly last night when they were able to at least get something on paper that, you know, had broad bipartisan support, but we still could be, you know, talking about a shutdown in late September. And another vote, the senate also passed this sweeping Russia sanctions bill yesterday, that has the senator the late senator Lindsey Graham's name on it. We talked about it a little bit earlier.

So it does a couple things. It allows the president to impose tariffs of up t