Todd Blanche’s Memoir Has the Tone of a Child Screaming ‘It’s Not Fair’ Z News

This is anything but a typical lawyer’s brief.

This is not a small stylistic quibble. Lawyers know to attack the arguments being made, not the person making them, because the judges notice, because the opposing lawyer will quote them to you, and because the moment you look for an adjective instead of a quote, you have announced to the court that you no longer have any rights. Also because that’s how professionalism works.

The recent Justice Department filing (available in full below) is… well, something else entirely.

The document is the government’s response in Phang v. Whitejournalist Katie Phang, who filed a lawsuit under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, filed suit in April after the DOJ said her production was complete, but it really wasn’t. Judge Emmet Sullivan granted Phang a preliminary injunction on June 25, finding that the acting attorney general had actually conceded violation by refusing to respond on the merits. Blanche had until July 2 to delete the documents or justify her refusal. Spoiler alert: the documents were not available and Blanche filed a response in place of the documents. Phang asked for penalties of $1,000 per day.

According to Blanche, Phang’s record is “filled with hyperbolic rhetoric.” His articles “make several wild claims.” One of his characterizations is “patently false.” Another is “patently false.” She makes “sensational and unsubstantiated claims.” She makes a “diminished assertion.” His sanctions argument is “absurd,” then, one clause later, “even more absurd.”

There is also a real problem with proofreading in government work. The opening paragraph states that the government’s prior record “presents justifications and arguments” – presumably “justification”, but at this point who can say. A later sentence explains that “treating newly adopted new and novel theories under threat of contempt and sanctions is not the procedure contemplated by the federal rules.” A recently adopted what? The name never comes. Somewhere in there, complainant also pluralizes to “complainants” and then vice versa.

This is the same Justice Department that filed a brief with the DRAFT watermark still on every page, the same one that has now lost 10,000 federal attorneys, the same one that dangles $25,000 signing bonuses to anyone willing to take the job. When you exclude everyone with real experience, you get this.

That filing is just one paragraph of an argument — the government argues that the Privacy Act provides civil remedies and criminal penalties for willful violations, and Phang has brushed that aside by saying the Epstein Act simply trumps it as subsequent law — surrounded by pages of grievances. And he insists, in simple terms, that the Department is committed to transparency and meeting its statutory obligations. What the Justice Department actually did, of course, was throw away millions of pages of irrelevant documents — including, memorably, a Above the law newsletter written years after Epstein’s death – all while hiding the documents anyone actually wanted.

This briefing comes at a crucial time for Blanche, who is in the midst of the Senate confirmation process to make her position as acting AG permanent. Thom Tillis conditioned his vote on Blanche meeting with Epstein survivors, so Blanche met with them on July 16, and the survivors described him as abrasive and condescending.

On Tuesday, around twenty of them put it in writing. In an open letter to Tillis and John Cornyn — the two Judiciary Committee Republicans best positioned to derail the nomination, one retired and the other already a primary — the survivors said the meeting was “an hour of diversion, interruption and spotlighting,” and that Blanche showed no remorse for a release that exposed their identities and images. They called the session a “box-checking exercise held only after his confirmation was put in jeopardy,” and told Tillis directly that Blanche’s willingness to be in the room should matter less than how he behaved once he was there. Annie Farmer, who attended that meeting, previously said it made her more confident that senators should vote no.

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