1. United States
2. N.C.
3. Letter

Senator Tillis, You don't answer to Trump anymore. You answer to your own record, and to the oath you took to defend the Constitution - not a president, not a party, not a former client. You set your own test for Todd Blanche: "if there's even a whiff of a lack of independence, then that could influence my vote." By his own words, in writing, he has now failed that test. The safe vote might be confirming him anyway, but it’s also the vote that history won’t forgive. - Blanche won't put the fund's death in writing, and he just admitted why. The $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" fund isn't just bad optics; it's a settlement that would have funneled federal money to Trump allies, including people who assaulted police officers on January 6. You asked Blanche directly whether he'd revive it if Trump ordered him to. He refused to say no, calling it "inappropriate" to discuss. That's the whiff. It's not hypothetical anymore; it's his own written answer to your question. - The DOJ continues to stonewall under Todd Blanche. In his written responses to the committee, he invoked "inappropriate for me to comment" more than 160 times and used that exact dodge with you specifically more than 20 times, including your direct question about how the DOJ justified the $1.776 billion figure. A nominee who won't answer the senator whose vote he needs is not demonstrating independence; he's demonstrating that he expects to get confirmed without ever having to. - The DOJ is losing cases at a historically unprecedented rate. Retired federal judge John E. Jones III said in nearly 20 years on the bench he never once saw a grand jury refuse to indict. Under Blanche, grand juries have returned "no true bills" at least six separate times in D.C. alone, plus twice against Letitia James and once against six sitting members of Congress. Indictments that were obtained have then been dismissed (e.g. Comey, James, Abrego Garcia, and Eric Adams among others) with judges citing unlawful appointments, vindictive prosecution, and "profound investigative missteps." A D.C. magistrate judge separately cited a 21% dismissal rate for federal prosecutors during this period. This isn't prosecutorial toughness meeting resistance. It's what happens when cases are built to satisfy a president rather than the evidence, and the judicial system is rejecting them at a rate with no real precedent. - The DOJ refuses to investigate ICE's killing of innocent Americans and documented immigrants. Blanche declared the DOJ would not investigate the fatal ICE shooting of Renée Good before any review of evidence took place. Minnesota has since sued the federal government, alleging it is being blocked from evidence in the deaths of both Good and Alex Pretti. An Attorney General who pre-clears law enforcement killings as beyond review isn't protecting public safety. He's telling federal agents they're unaccountable, which is how trust in law enforcement collapses. - Todd Blanche is misleading Congress and the public on Epstein, not just slow-walking it. He has publicly claimed the DOJ "has now released all the files" while, by his own prior statements, the DOJ was still withholding millions of pages on privilege grounds, which the statute doesn't authorize. A federal judge found in June that Blanche had effectively conceded he was violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act and ordered further unredacted releases, including translation of foreign language documents the DOJ hadn't even processed. This isn't a transparency failure. It's a sitting DOJ official telling Congress something is finished that a federal court determined isn't true. - He has declared, without further investigation, that there's nothing left to prosecute on the largest sex-trafficking scandal of a generation. DOJ's own review found over 6 million pages, thousands of videos, and tens of thousands of images tied to Epstein's network, and Blanche concluded that evidence supports no further charges against anyone. No new indictments. No new accountability for the powerful people who enabled or participated in trafficking children for years. When a Justice Department sits on that volume of evidence and simply declares the matter closed, that isn't prosecutorial discretion. It’s obstructing the justice that victims and survivors have spent years fighting for. - He has purged experienced prosecutors for doing their jobs, not for cause. Over 1,200 former DOJ officials spanning 14 administrations - Republican and Democratic alike - have gone on record opposing this confirmation, citing an exodus of roughly 16,000 DOJ employees, many pushed out for declining to pursue cases they saw no evidence for. Losing that much institutional expertise doesn't just weaken one administration's DOJ. It weakens the government's ability to prosecute real crime, including the cases North Carolinians actually need prosecuted for years after Blanche is gone. - He has pursued cases courts have called vindictive, not principled. The prosecution of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was dismissed for vindictive prosecution, with the court citing Blanche's own statements. Grand juries have refused to indict Letitia James twice and six Democratic members of Congress once - outcomes that occur in roughly 6 of 150,000 federal cases historically. When juries reject prosecutions this consistently, it isn't bad luck. It's the system correcting for prosecutions that were never about evidence. - The DOJ has pulled back sharply on prosecuting corporate and white-collar crime. DOJ has closed roughly half the foreign bribery investigations it inherited, and its specialized unit for that work has shrunk by nearly a third. Independent reporting shows a broader shift away from criminal charges against corporations in favor of negotiated settlements. Every dollar corporate criminals don't have to answer for is a cost ordinary Americans and honest competitors absorb instead - in fraud, in unsafe products, in market advantages built on cheating rather than competing. - When the DOJ walks away, North Carolina has to finish the job itself. The DOJ sued Live Nation/Ticketmaster for illegally monopolizing the ticketing industry, then abruptly settled mid-trial in March 2026 for a fraction of what the case was worth - a deal NC Attorney General Jeff Jackson called "a terrible deal" that DOJ hid from the states until the last minute. North Carolina and dozens of other states, Republican and Democratic alike, refused the settlement and kept litigating on their own. In April, a jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster liable on every single claim. North Carolinians shouldn't have to rely on their state AG to clean up after a federal Department of Justice unwilling to finish what it started. You established your own standard. Blanche is failing it in real time, in his own words, to you. Confirming him now wouldn't be neutral. It would mean setting aside the test you said mattered. I'm asking you not to confirm Todd Blanche.