All the President’s Henchmen

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Strict Scrutiny is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. 250 years into the American experiment, it's time for all of us to decide, what kind of country do we want to be? The founding fathers got a lot of things wrong, but one thing they got right was knowing that church and state need to be kept separate. Christian nationalists are trying to destroy that history and take this country down a scary path. They are misusing government power to impose their beliefs, to rewrite our history, and to decide who belongs in America.
AU refuses to let that happen. Every single day, Americans United is fighting back and holding the line against Christian nationalism with everything they've got. AU has sued the Trump administration seven times in the last year alone, and 12 times since his second administration began. They have challenged government officials who use taxpayer resources to promote their religious beliefs, they're exposing abuses of power, defending public schools, and holding the government accountable when it violates the Constitution.
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:17)
Mr. Chief Justice, please report. It's an old joke, but when an argument man argues against two beautiful ladies like this, they're going to have the last word.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:29)
She spoke, not elegantly, but with unmistakable clarity. She said, I ask no favor for my sex.
All I ask of our brethren is that they take their feet off our necks.

**Kate Shaw** (2:00)
Hello and welcome back to Strict Scrutiny, your podcast about the Supreme Court and the political culture that surrounds it. I am your lone regular host today, Kate Shaw, and I'm very happy to be joined by guest host, Liz Oyer, former pardon attorney of the United States and federal public defender and host of the new podcast, Is This Really Legal? Liz, welcome to Strict Scrutiny.

**Liz Oyer** (2:19)
Thanks so much for having me, Kate.

**Kate Shaw** (2:21)
Well, I'm delighted you're here and listeners. Liz and I are going to run through the latest legal news. And after that, I am delighted to bring you a conversation with Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer about their new book, On Courage, How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. The book is incredible, so definitely don't miss that conversation.
Okay, but Liz, let's get started. I am super happy to have you with me today because there is a lot of DOJ news to cover, and I know DOJ is very much your beat. So maybe let's start with the swearing in of one Todd Blanche. Now, you testified against Blanche in his Senate confirmation hearing, alas, to no avail because he ultimately was confirmed, although it was a squeaker, right? And I do take some small comfort in the fact that I think this was the closest confirmation of an attorney general in history, 50 to 49 At least I haven't found any that were closer, which would have meant a tiebreaker by the vice president, which didn't have to happen here. But I guess it was important that there was as much opposition as there was to Blanche. And Liz, will you just tell our listeners for a minute about kind of what you emphasized in your testimony against him?

**Liz Oyer** (3:29)
Yeah, this was a real nail-biter, Kate. I mean, it came down to the wire. There were about two weeks of negotiations between a couple of Republican holdouts and the White House over Blanche's confirmation. But I have to say, I was really disappointed that the number of issues that got any traction with Republicans as potential reasons to oppose Blanche was actually very, very small. There were really only two issues that broke through at all. One, to a lesser extent, was the Epstein matter and Blanche's mishandling of the Epstein files and his mistreatment of Jeffrey Epstein's victims. And the other was this issue with the corrupt settlement fund that was entered into between essentially Donald Trump on one side of this litigation and Donald Trump on the other side of the litigation. And that was the one that ended up really holding up the negotiations over whether Blanche would be confirmed, this settlement agreement. But those were the only two issues. There are actually so many reasons to oppose Todd Blanche as Attorney General. And that's what I focused on in my testimony. I testified about my own personal experience of being fired by Todd Blanche shortly after he was confirmed as the Deputy Attorney General. And I was one of many people. I was part of a purge of the career workforce of the Justice Department. Blanche oversaw hundreds of firings of people for political reasons essentially because of cases that they worked on under the previous administration and because of their refusal to essentially rubber stamp political favors for friends of the president. In my case, I refused to rubber stamp the reinstatement of the gun ownership rights of a friend of the president who had lost his right to own a firearm because he was convicted of a very serious domestic violence crime.