U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis said Thursday she supports President Donald Trump’s troubled nominee for attorney general, Todd Blanche, despite a letter from 71 Wyoming attorneys opposing his confirmation.
A person holding the highest law enforcement post in the country, as leader of the Department of Justice, the attorney general must possess “extraordinary judgement and integrity, as well as the independence and fundamental leadership qualities necessary to captain the enormous ship of the Department of Justice,” the July 16 letter to Republican U.S. Sens. Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso states.
“In his time of service as the acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has demonstrated that he does not have any of those necessary qualities,” the letter reads.
The letter includes 187 pages of court decisions adverse to Blanche including a court order in Trump’s infamous suit against the IRS in which the parties settled for an anti-weaponization fund of $1,776 billion. Blanche, who was formerly Trump’s private defense attorney, played key roles in forging the settlement.
“No ethical lawyer worth his salt would be a part of this colossal abuse of our judicial system.”
Wyoming Rule of Law Group
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami ruled that the scheme was “an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement [to] earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.”
“No ethical lawyer worth his salt would be a part of this colossal abuse of our judicial system,” the Wyoming lawyers wrote to their senators.
Judge Williams directed her order to be mailed to the New York Bar, of which Blanche is a member, for possible disciplinary action.
Barrasso did not respond to a request for comment on the lawyers’ letter. Lummis did.
“Todd Blanche has done an extraordinary job as Acting Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General and has spent years fighting against liberal lawfare that targeted conservatives and President Trump,” an email from her spokesperson Joe Jackson reads. “Senator Lummis has personally sat down with Acting AG Blanche twice and will vote to confirm this qualified nominee.”
Barrasso told Oil City News that he met with Blanche this week and that he’s “confident if confirmed, Mr. Blanche will be an effective U.S. Attorney General.”
Rule of Law Group
The letter was written and signed by members of the Rule of Law Group — 200 Wyoming attorneys who began organizing after Jan. 6., said Bill Schwartz, a fourth-generation Wyoming native who grew up in Casper, graduated from the University of Wyoming Law School and lived in Cheyenne before settling in Jackson.
Without the rule of law, democracy fails, he said. “It’s at the foundation of everything we aspire to.”
“If there are not rules that we all respect and there are not adjudicators of the rules that we all respect, it just becomes might-is-right,” he said. “It’s so unbelievable to us how quickly our people have been ready to just throw the independence of the judiciary under the bus and blame judges for trying to undermine the executive authority.”
After the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol, the Rule of Law Group wanted to speak out. “We thought we should say something,” to support the poll workers, Capitol defenders, then-Rep. Liz Cheney and others who defended the bedrock democratic principle, Schwartz said. But because lawyers in Wyoming are required to join the state bar association, that group cannot engage in political debate, he said.
“The U.S. Supreme Court said [the Wyoming State Bar] can’t get involved in political issues,” Schwartz said.
“I understand the rule,” Schwartz said of the prohibition. But the lawyers needed “an association where we are free to speak our minds.”
“We’ve been asleep at the wheel … and not really doing much in the political realm in Wyoming,” he said. The group wrote its first essay after the Jan. 6 attack to overturn the presidential election results and has written numerous op-eds, and private and public letters to the Wyoming delegation, he said.
Lawmakers are not ensuring the foundation of democracy remains intact, he said.
“We don’t have our legislative branch supporting our judicial branch,” Schwartz said. “In fact, they just piled on, undermining the credibility of our whole system of laws, precedents and respect for courts.”
“Piling on” comes as federal judges in particular are receiving threats “not just to them but their families,” he said.
Lummis’ first act as a U.S. senator, the first woman senator from the Equality State, was “to throw out the votes of I don’t know how many Pennsylvanians,” Schwartz said. Lummis was one of a handful of GOP senators who objected on Jan. 7, 2021, to certifying the vote of electors in Pennsylvania. She released a statement explaining that she had “serious concerns about election integrity, especially in Pennsylvania,” but that the attack on the Capitol had overshadowed that debate.
The lawyers’ letter, one sentence longer than two pages, not counting the 71 signatures and attachments, asks Barrasso and Lummis to explain “how you could justify dismissing the very serious factual evidence of [Blanche’s] lack of qualifications, judgment, and independence” if they do back Blanche.
Among the signers of the July 16 letter to the senators are retired judges “sworn to uphold the Constitution,” including former chief justices of the Wyoming Supreme Court, several former Wyoming attorneys general, many retired district and circuit court judges, and dozens of practicing and retired lawyers, the Rule of Law Group said in a statement.
(WyoFile board member Susan Stubson signed this letter. She was not involved in the production of this story, and neither she nor any member of the WyoFile board have authority to direct news coverage or news content.)
You know our three ‘reps’ are reprehensible. They’ll go down in history as the worst. These three goofballs do not have any integrity or good judgement.