Todd Blanche Threatens to Arrest Democrats Over “Rhetoric”

Attorney General Todd Blanche doubled down on Tuesday on his threat to go after Democrats in Congress. Speaking on Fox & Friends, Blanche claimed his role in government was “to defend the administration.” From what, exactly? The supposedly “vile rhetoric” of incoming Democratic lawmakers arriving on Capitol Hill. “You can disagree with this administration, you can want to legislate your way with new policies, but you cannot threaten, and that’s what we’re seeing, and that’s what we’re very concerned about at the Department of Justice,” he said. “We cannot let the rhetoric turn from just honest debate to actual criminal conduct,” he added. The attorney general didn’t deign to provide a single example of a criminal act by the Democratic Party. The so-called threats he was referring to, the rest of us simply know as oversight—something which was rendered impossible by the Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Now Democrats have warned the Trump administration to “lawyer up,” and clearly, its lawyer has responded by threatening free speech. What a show of confidence.The attorney general’s role has historically been to represent the United States and provide legal advice to the president and his Cabinet officials. The Justice Department is meant to be an independent organization, free from presidential interference. Clearly, Blanche has stretched the role of U.S. attorney general to be weaponized against the president’s perceived political enemies.During yet another public meltdown on CNN on Sunday, Blanche admitted that he’d target Democrats at Trump’s behest and openly accused Democrats of threatening “anybody that’s conservative and anybody that happens to be a Republican.” Bari Weiss’s 60 Minutes edited its latest interview with Donald Trump to make the octogenarian’s responses appear much more sane than they actually were.During one exchange between Trump and host Ross Douthat on the topic of Ukraine, the staff at 60 Minutes decided to trim several sections of Trump’s response that included false claims or total fabrications.“There’s still a war going on. What’s the biggest obstacle to peace?” asked Douthat.“It was the hatred between [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelenskiy and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin,” Trump said in the version of the program that aired Sunday.But much more was left on the cutting room floor, according to an unedited version published Decoding Fox News founder Juliet Jeske. “I believe that we’re very close to making a deal,” Trump said. “And I think it—two things, if I were president, because as you know, well you’re not going to admit it, it was rigged. That’s why I did it a third time. If I was president that war would have never started.”During another portion of the interview, 60 Minutes cut Trump’s answer when he attempted to puff himself up as tough on Russia and soft on Ukraine: “Look what I did to them as an example. I gave them the anti-tank busters, right?”“I’ve given them, in fact there’s an old statement, that [Barack] Obama gave them sheets, and I gave them anti-tank busters, okay? That’s what I gave them,” Trump said.“But now it’s Europe supplying weapons, not us?” asked Douthat.“No, it’s us. We’re supplying the weapons, Europe is paying for them,” Trump answered. “Here’s the difference: [Joe] Biden gave them $350 billion worth of cash and weapons. I gave them nothing.”It’s not unusual for news programs to edit interviews before they go live on air. But there is a deep irony that Trump seems perfectly content to have his answers edited for time and clarity, little more than two years after he went on a rampage against CBS News for doing the same to Kamala Harris while she was on the 2024 campaign trail.At the time, Trump insisted that the network had selectively edited Harris’s answers to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump sued the network for $10 billion after the interview, claiming that the different clips were tantamount to “election interference” and merited CBS losing its broadcast license. CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, settled the lawsuit for $16 million the following year.But Trump’s campaign against 60 Minutes initiated its reputational descent. In the months that followed the settlement, Paramount Global merged with Skydance, allowing CBS News to be taken over by David Ellison, the son of Trump’s good friend Larry Ellison.The younger Ellison thereafter appointed Free Press founder Weiss to run the CBS newsroom, despite the fact that she had zero qualifications to do so. Weiss has since dismantled large portions of CBS, including 60 Minutes, forcing out dozens of highly esteemed anchors, correspondents, and producers in the process, and replacing them with the likes of Douthat, a former conservative columnist for The New York Times.Weiss’s indisputably negative impact on CBS News was made apparent last week during election night, when the network’s ratings finished dead last among all major broadcasters and cable networks, according to Nielsen data obtained by media reporter Brain Stelter.Read more about the interview:Did Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth think it was too woke to keep track of $1.3 billion worth of fighter jet parts?A report published on Monday by the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, found that the Defense Department has not kept adequate records of parts for the F-35 Lightning II, which are worth an estimated $31 billion in total.As of March, 17,000 parts that were in maintenance or repair were missing from the F-35 Joint Program Office’s enterprise logistics management system. The total value of the parts was estimated to be $1.3 billion, but officials stated that the value could be as high as $2.5 billion when accounting for other burden costs.The GAO also uncovered evidence that suggested serious data quality issues. Only 29 percent of the records in a December 2025 contract data requirements list contained serial numbers, and six percent of records showed an acquisition cost of $0.01 or less.This report comes as the House of Representatives is poised to vote on a procedural motion on Hegseth’s impeachment on Tuesday evening. Outgoing Republican Representative Thomas Massie’s 34-page impeachment resolution accuses Hegseth of committing a slew of impeachable offenses such as illegally waging war against Iran, suppressing free speech, ignoring laws intended to minimize civilian casualties, and overseeing extrajudicial killings and the kidnapping of a foreign leader. Hegseth claimed on Tuesday that not only were his contested actions lawful, but they also resulted in military victories.President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency products have plummeted in value following Republicans’ massive defeat in the midterm elections last week.The Washington Sun reports that $WLFI, the “governance token” from Trump’s crypto firm World Liberty Financial, has dropped to $1.11 after a high of $40 last year. The meme coin marked by first lady Melania Trump, MELANIA, lost half its value after the midterms and has fallen 99.6 percent since last year.Democrats’ plan to investigate Trump’s crypto products appears to be the main reason for their drop in value. Zach Everson, the research director at nonprofit Public Citizen, told the Sun, “This is all now worthless.”“It’s the lame-duck period of Trump’s crypto investments: His political influence is waning and so is interest in his crypto offerings,” Everson said. “Not that there should have been any doubt, but these price drops clearly show how much the market for Trump’s crypto products relies on his political power.”Everson calculated that Trump’s crypto investors have lost $4.7 billion. Trump, meanwhile, has increased his net worth by $3 billion in his second term as president, although he lost more than $200 million thanks to his stocks tanking after the midterms.Trump tried to defend his increased wealth on 60 Minutes on Sunday, claiming that he devotes “almost no time to my net worth” and dismissing concerns about the foreign entities that invest in World Liberty Financial, such as the United Arab Emirates. In less than two weeks, he’s hosting a dinner for the top 185 holders of his meme coin, GetTrumpMemes.com, and the top 29 buyers get an invite to a “VIP Reception with YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT.” The top four get an 18-karat gold “Trump Victory” watch. It seems that Trump’s cash grab will continue as long as he is allowed. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy may be gone from the MAGA agenda, but their underlings from the Department of Government Efficiency are still wreaking havoc across the government.Sam Corcos, a former DOGE staffer who was reassigned to the Technology Transformation Services office in the General Services Administration, or GSA, has resurrected one of Musk’s most unpopular mandates. On Friday, Corcos ordered more than 200 of his coworkers to provide daily reports about their job and responsibilities to him via email, The Washington Sun reported on Tuesday.“The purpose of these updates is to help us better understand what everyone is working on, give TTS Front Office a clearer picture of progress across the organization, and identify any blockers,” Corcos wrote.In order to comply with Corcos’s directive, some GSA employees must send in a summary of the work they completed that day, a plan for their work the next day, and any problems they need assistance to solve.“Failure to comply may result in adverse action,” Corcos noted in his email.But affected federal employees do not seem open to Corcos’s new rules, likening the initiative to Musk’s notoriously unsuccessful “five things” email requirement. One GSA employee told the Sun that the message is indicative of Corcos’s “basic distrust in and underestimation of federal workers.”Another GSA staffer explained to the Sun that it didn’t feel like Corcos was genuinely interested in helping the agency surface problems but that it instead “feels like they’re trying to mess with our heads again.”Weeks into President Donald Trump’s second term, Musk threatened thousands of federal employees with immediate termination if they failed to obey a similar self-report mandate, which required government workers to identify five things that they achieved in the previous week. The initiative was intended to radically size down the government, but it instead posed a major security threat and was shut down within days by the Office of Personnel Management.