Todd Blanche, President Donald Trump’s attorney general nominee, wants a promotion. But thanks to his involvement in the $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund, his mismanagement of the Epstein files while serving as a senior Justice Department official, and so on, he also has a problem on his hands: Any one of a dozen Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee could effectively deny Blanche the job by voting no.
Thus, ahead of Thursday’s committee vote, which Blanche must pass in order to make it to the Senate floor, a few enterprising senators seem to have looked at his frankly impressive record of corruption and correctly assessed that they could try to get something out of him in exchange for their vote.
The recent demands from Missouri’s Josh Hawley, Texas’s Ted Cruz, and Utah’s Mike Lee just so happen to involve abortion, an issue on which conservatives say that President Donald Trump could be much more aggressive. In June, Hawley was the first to ask Blanche for an anti-abortion favor: that, if confirmed, Blanche would direct the DOJ to stop defending the Food and Drug Administration in a lawsuit over abortion pills. Since then, it appears that other Republicans have looked at the committee math and thought, “I should get in on that.”
Trump, for his part, doesn’t seem very interested in further restricting abortion—especially not in the lead-up to the midterm elections. But Blanche may feel pressured to placate some of these lawmakers just to secure his promotion.
First, a few days after Blanche’s confirmation hearing, four Judiciary Committee members joined a letter from Lee urging Blanche to investigate five fetuses found in the home of an anti-abortion activist and ensure a burial of the remains. The subject of this letter is a far-right fever dream that dates back to 2022: Lauren Handy, then the director of activism at Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising, claims that she acquired a total of 115 fetuses from a medical waste company truck driver outside an abortion clinic in Washington, D.C. The group asserted that five were aborted in the second or third trimester, and demanded local and federal investigations into whether the abortions violated a ban on a specific procedure that Congress passed in 2003.
There is no way to tell where the fetuses actually came from, but D.C. police said they appeared to be the result of legal abortions. Handy only revealed the existence of the fetuses when the Justice Department indicted her for blockading the clinic in 2020. She was sentenced to five years in prison, but Trump pardoned her in January 2025.
Now, Handy’s allies in Congress want answers. Republicans gave a right-wing media outlet an exclusive on Lee’s letter to Blanche, and the connection of the demand to the committee vote is unmistakable: The headline literally reads “Republican Senators Make Big Demand Of Todd Blanche Ahead Of Confirmation Vote,” and the report notes that Blanche needs the support of Hawley, Lee, Cruz, and Iowa’s Chuck Grassley in order to get out of committee.
If Blanche were to direct the DOJ and FBI to conduct an investigation, that result wouldn’t directly affect abortion access, but it’s worth noting that the letter was endorsed by influential anti-abortion groups, including Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, National Right to Life, and Students for Life Action. Those groups also got behind Hawley’s June demand that Blanche “resolve” Louisiana’s mifepristone lawsuit against the FDA with a consent decree that would re-impose in-person appointments for medication abortion. (Hawley’s wife Erin is helping represent the state in that case.) This action would halt telehealth prescriptions of mifepristone while litigation continues, and conservatives certainly hope the FDA will make the policy permanent after the midterms, using a bogus safety “review” as cover.
(Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
During Blanche’s hearing, Cruz was most aggressive on the issue of the DOJ’s stance on the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that the far right hopes to weaponize as a nationwide abortion ban. Cruz got Blanche to “commit” to “carefully review” a Biden-era memo that said the Comstock Act doesn’t preclude the Postal Service and carriers like FedEx and UPS from delivering abortion medication to states with abortion bans. An anti-abortion group later took credit for feeding Cruz the question, and in a press release said that enforcing the law “would be a magnificent win for the pro-life movement.”
Hawley, meanwhile, has also applied Comstock-related pressure to Blanche, asking him to have the DOJ consider the proposition that mailing mifepristone to a state that bans abortion violates the Comstock Act. Blanche replied that, if confirmed, he would consult with the Office of Legal Counsel, which provides the attorney general with legal advice.
Importantly, last summer, Trump appointed a lawyer named Josh Craddock to an OLC leadership role, and Craddock’s position is even more extreme than Hawley’s: In 2024, Craddock told NPR that he believed the law “prohibits all interstate shipment or sale of abortion drugs and devices, regardless of whether state law allows abortion.” Two days after Trump returned to office, Craddock, then a scholar with the conservative James Wilson Institute, signed a letter asking the Justice Department to rescind the Biden OLC’s Comstock memo. How convenient for Hawley that this guy would be advising Blanche.
Finally, on July 17, Hawley made yet another request of Blanche: a criminal referral urging Blanche to have the DOJ investigate Plan C, a website with information about how people can get abortion pills in all 50 states. Plan C doesn’t prescribe or ship medications, but Hawley accused the nonprofit of conspiring with mifepristone manufacturers to violate state abortion bans and the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. If the DOJ were to take action against Plan C, it could result in censoring the site, while an aggressive investigation of the pill network could shut down clinician services and community organizations that get the drugs to people.
It’s no surprise that several of the asks of Blanche are about restricting access to medication abortion specifically. Conservatives are furious that abortions have increased, not decreased, since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, in large part due to the availability of abortion pills via telehealth in all 50 states. Project 2025 outlined several steps the Trump administration could take to limit access to abortion pills, which it called “the single greatest threat to unborn children in a post-Roe world.” In 18 months, Trump has done none of them.
Hawley and company want to change that—to signal to the base that they’re trying to force more abortion restrictions. If Blanche complies, the president technically still has some plausible deniability: He could argue that his attorney general is just following the law, and that he had nothing to do with it.
Blanche has shown since serving as Trump’s personal lawyer that he’s happy to do what Trump wants, and Trump may not want abortion in the headlines ahead of the midterms. But Blanche also wants this job, and agreeing to gut abortion access might be the price the former registered Democrat has to pay for it.
