Senate Confirms Trump's Former Defense Lawyer Todd Blanche as Attorney General, 50-49

The Senate confirmed Todd Blanche as Attorney General by a vote of 50-49 in an overnight session early Saturday, August 8, 2026. He was sworn in on Monday, August 10. Blanche had been Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney — representing him in two federal prosecutions and the New York hush-money trial — before becoming Deputy Attorney General, then acting AG for roughly four months after Pam Bondi’s firing on April 2.

The arithmetic of the vote is the record. Susan Collins (ME) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) were the only Republicans to vote no, citing the department’s increasing politicization. Every Democrat opposed. Mitch McConnell (KY) was absent. That left Bill Cassidy (LA) — who had been a holdout and announced his support in a floor speech the previous morning — as the deciding vote. One senator’s decision, and one absence, separated confirmation from failure.

This ratifies what the April firing only proposed. When Trump installed Blanche as acting AG, the significance was that the President’s personal defense lawyer now ran the department that prosecutes on the public’s behalf — the principal-agent relationship made explicit rather than mediated. That arrangement could have been read as temporary, a stopgap while a conventional nominee was found. The Senate has now made it permanent by one vote, with the chamber’s advice-and-consent function exercised and cleared.

Note the argument his own supporters made, because it concedes the premise. Blanche’s defenders held that his closeness to Trump would make him more able than Bondi to push back on the President’s demands — that personal loyalty is a source of independence rather than its absence. Bondi was fired not for weaponizing the department, which was demanded, but for failing to make the weaponization succeed against grand juries and judges. The replacement’s qualification is a closer personal relationship with the person whose demands are at issue.

The confirmation fight also surfaced a specific concern that had not been public in April: critics raised a $1.8 billion fund to compensate Trump allies, which remains a thread this timeline has not independently documented and should not treat as established on confirmation-hearing coverage alone.

Sourcing note. The 50-49 count, the overnight timing, the Collins/Murkowski no votes, McConnell’s absence and Cassidy’s deciding role are all tier-1 and consistent across NPR, PBS, CNN and NBC. A reported 4:31 a.m. gavel time was REMOVED from this entry: check_sourcing.py Rule 1 gated it, and three successfully-read sources (NPR, PBS, CNN) contain no such figure. It came from a search summary rather than a verified source. “Overnight” and “early Saturday” are what the sources say. The $1.8B fund figure comes from PBS’s characterization of critics’ arguments and has not been traced to a primary document — flagged rather than asserted.