Senator Adam Schiff of California spent five hours questioning Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday. He left with what he called one question. He should have left with a mirror.
Because Blanche had a question of his own — why would an innocent man need a preemptive pardon?
The hearing was nominally about Blanche's nomination for Attorney General. In practice, it was Schiff's audition tape for cable news, complete with the same Russia collusion material he's been running since 2017. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, was not interested in playing along. When Schiff accused him of ethical violations, Blanche cut him off: "What you're saying happens to not be true. I did not do that."
That exchange set the tone. Schiff kept pressing. Blanche kept swinging back. "You can't accuse me of violating my ethical rules and then lie about what I did," Blanche told the senator. The room was watching a man who spent years leaking classified information and fabricating collusion narratives get fact-checked in real time by someone who actually prosecutes cases for a living.
Schiff later posted on social media: "After five hours of evasive answers, I was left with one question: what happened to Todd Blanche?" Blanche had already answered that one during the hearing itself. "You asked me 'what happened to Todd Blanche?' I am still here. I am the same exact person I was when I was a federal prosecutor in the SDNY."
The Department of Justice under Blanche has filed nearly 100,000 indictments and informations since January 20th. That's the record Schiff was supposedly there to examine. Instead, he recycled the same debunked accusations that got him censured by the House and earned him a preemptive pardon from President Biden on the way out the door.
About that pardon. The standard Democratic defense is that Biden was simply protecting allies from "political persecution." Reasonable people can disagree about motive. But preemptive pardons exist for one reason — to prevent prosecution for conduct that could be charged. You don't buy an umbrella because you enjoy carrying one.
Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii joined the pile-on, but Schiff was the main act. He's spent years on CNN and MSNBC claiming he had direct evidence of Trump-Russia collusion. The evidence never materialized. The Mueller report didn't find it. The Senate Intelligence Committee didn't find it. Schiff kept saying it on camera anyway, because the cameras kept inviting him back.
Blanche's sharpest moment came when he stopped defending and started declaring. "The truth has to matter!" he told the committee. It was directed at Schiff, but it landed on the entire apparatus that elevated a congressman's cable news performances into something resembling a legal case.
Schiff got his pardon. Blanche got his hearing. One of them brought receipts.
