“The Very Importance of Facts Is Dismissed, or Ignored:” Todd Blanche Whines about Women Judges, Again

Yesterday, just ten minutes after the last career AUSA, Terry Henry, dropped off the Perkins Coie case (using a letter purportedly authored by Doug Dreier, who dropped off the case Tuesday), DOJ filed a motion to disqualify Beryl Howell from the case.

Fair proceedings free from any suggestion of impartiality are essential to the integrity of our country’s judiciary and the need to curtail ongoing improper encroachments of President Trump’s Executive Power playing out across the country. In this case, reasonable observers may well view this Court as insufficiently impartial to adjudicate the meritless challenges to President Trump’s efforts to implement the agenda that the American people elected him to carry out. In fact, this Court has repeatedly demonstrated partiality against and animus towards the President.

The motion is packed with allegations that don’t even make sense. Beryl Howell sinned by:

Questioning Twitter’s motives for defying a lawful warrant.
Upholding the gag order in the Twitter case for reasons other than what DOJ claims.
Disagreeing that Trump’s pardon of an accused cop assailant corrected “a grave national injustice.”
Finding that Trump had attempted to get Evan Corcoran to break the law for him.
Correcting Chad Mizelle’s false claims about the Steele dossier by saying, “you cannot be saying that there was nobody involved in the 2016 Trump campaign that had any connection with any Russian; you can’t say that.”
Noting that Trump lost a lawsuit against Perkins Coie.

The recusal motion says nothing about the fact that Howell oversaw the grand jury investigation of Michael Sussmann, permitting repeated subpoenas to law firms, including Perkins Coie. Beryl Howell treated Trump no better or worse than she did Sussmann.

Perhaps the craziest excuse given for demanding that Howell recuse, though, regurgitated an Elise Stefanik complaint that at a public appearance in 2023, Beryl Howell quoted Heather Cox Richardson about propaganda, without mentioning Trump at all.

This historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose book I’ve been reading . . . cautions in her book’s opening line . . . “America is at a crossroads teetering on the brink of authoritarianism” and she echoes this thought in her closing line, that we are at a time of testing and how it comes out . . . is in our own hands.

(This video was originally posted by one of Steve Bannon’s propagandists.)

In other words, DOJ’s political appointees, including Todd Blanche, are demanding that Beryl Howell recuse from this case because she warned about precisely the kinds of disinformation that DOJ spews in this court filing.

Blanche’s involvement is not just symbolic. This filing was authored by someone in the Deputy Attorney General’s office — Blanche’s office.

Blanche’s involvement matters for two reasons.

First, this is a ploy that Todd Blanche pulled before, back before taxpayers were on the hook to pay him to serve as defense attorney for Donald Trump. Back in September 2023, he moved to disqualify Tanya Chutkan in Trump’s January 6 case because she had already had to deal with multiple January 6 defendants who compared their own conduct to that of Trump (though the complaint would have stood for any DC judge).

President Donald J. Trump, through undersigned counsel, respectfully moves to recuse and disqualify the Honorable Tanya S. Chutkan pursuant to 28 U.S.C. § 455(a). Fairness and impartiality are the central tenets of our criminal justice system.

Both a defendant and the public are entitled to a full hearing, on all relevant issues, by a Court that has not prejudged the guilt of the defendant, and whose neutrality cannot be reasonably questioned.

Todd Blanche, when he’s trying to defend Trump’s abuse of power, is making a habit of impugning women judges.

The other reason Blanche’s personal involvement matters is that most of the things he complains about are his own gripes carried over from serving as Trump’s defense attorney. Evan Corcoran testified that Trump deceived him about the classified documents his client was hoarding. Twitter ultimately turned over Trump’s account information, which proved that Trump was holding the weapon — the Twitter account — that almost got Mike Pence murdered. The way that Trump’s false claims led thousands to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power remained at the core of the prosecution of Trump even after SCOTUS had their way with the case.

Central to Perkins Coie’s argument is that Trump’s punitive Executive Order targeting the law firm amounts to a mulligan, an attempt to win legal battles he already lost, including the prosecution of Sussmann.

I think the government admitted to you that this was punitive. That makes a big difference, too, because in the separation of powers analysis, one thing you will look at — we submitted to you — that what they have done is just a mulligan from the things that happened in the judicial system.

Sussmann was indicted and acquitted. President Trump, as a private citizen, sued the law firm; and he lost. The punitive portion, courts mete out punishment, not the Presidents; and courts adjudicate, not Presidents.

Now, Blanche has done the same himself, making his own losses as a defense attorney the business of the United States.

It does nothing but prove that he has a conflict, not that Beryl Howell does.