Yes, he was one of Trump’s criminal attorneys, one of the few who got paid by Trump up front. Yes, he took an oath of personal loyalty to Donald Trump. Yes, he has been instrumental in keeping the powerful pedophile associates of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump well protected. Yes, he did the unprecedented when he, second in command at the Department of Justice, met twice with convicted sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell, after DOJ fired the prosecutor who put Maxwell in prison because the prosecutor was the daughter of someone the president considers an enemy. Right after Blanche met with her Maxwell was moved to a much more comfortable prison, usually off limits to sex offenders. I knew he was unprincipled, supremely brazen, and likely a psychopath, but until I watched this short interview, I had no idea how fucking stupid he is.
He had his talking points and he repeated them over and over again, trying to reframe what he kept calling “the narrative” we should be talking about, instead of focusing on the tragic death of this one guy who had been involved in a riot. He performed on Meet the Press as witlessly as ventriloquist dummy Scott Bessent, Kristi Noem, Robert Kennedy Jr., Pam Bondi or even Lindsey Halligan. He was less openly psychotic than Stephen Miller, but that’s not saying much.
Blanche was shown the short video leading up to the ten shots that killed Alex Pretti while he was flat on the ground. He was asked whether Pretti had wielded a gun at any point, or posed a deadly threat to the ICE/CBP officers who killed him, as claimed by Stephen Miller (“assassin”), Greg Bovino (“[Pretti] wanted to massacre law enforcement”[1]), Kristi Noem (“domestic terrorist”), Trump, Vance and the rest of the usual psychopaths. Blanche, by way of answering, blamed the governor of Minnesota and the mayor of Minneapolis for not protecting ICE and CBP officers during “riots”. In the most transparent reframing possible he kept insisting that the refusal of local officials to cooperate with ICE and Bovino’s Border Patrol was the real problem, and the cause of this tragic death of a rioter. To her credit, the interviewer kept redirecting Blanche back to her question about federal agents’ use of deadly force against a man holding a cellphone who they’d pepper sprayed and subdued, lying on the ground when they killed him in a hail of bullets. She never got any kind of direct answer to anything, and I understand, facts are generally very bad for Nazi arguments.
Blanche was dogged, he insisted that the real villains here are the obstinate and defiant anti law enforcement Minnesota officials and “rioters”, like the one tragically killed. The real victims, he insisted, are ICE and Border Patrol agents, who are doing a very hard job in the face of unchecked, open hostility in Minneapolis, and everyone is now attacking them because of one or two incidents in a hostile environment where they get no help from local officials when rioters keep obstructing them in their duties. The media keeps bringing up things like the 56 year-old man in his shorts dragged out of his house in Arctic Minneapolis weather and driven around in an unmarked van until they confirmed he was an American citizen, a couple of isolated tragedies that nobody wanted to see happen to anybody, that get blown out of proportion by agitators, rioters and those with contempt for law enforcement, the will of the Leader, etc. A tour de force of lawyerly ineptitude, and stubborn stupidity, which won’t matter, of course, if Project 2025 succeeds in creating the Nazi oligarch utopia here that they are so intent on bringing into being.
As Josef Goebbels observed during World War Two, which he believed was started by the Jews, depending on whether the Party won or lost the struggle “we will go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all times, or as the greatest criminals.” Apparently history, against the backdrop of powerful, unaccountable, super-wealthy, transactional, superior, entitled, infinitely covetous, fascist-friendly men, and their ladies, is once again debating this question.
[1] Gregory Bovino, head of Border Patrol operations said Alex Pretti was there to “perpetrate violence, obstruct, delay or obfuscate border patrol in the performance of their duties in an active crime scene.” He claimed “the suspect put himself in that situation. The victims are the border patrol agents there. [Pretti] brought a semiautomatic weapon to a riot, assaulted federal officers. This looks like a situation where an individual wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” (Heather Cox Richardson)
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