EXCLUSIVE: AG Blanche on DOJ Strategy to Combat Voter Fraud, Birth Tourism, and Chinese Espionage
[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW]In this episode, I sit down with U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche to discuss the Department of Justice’s latest work to combat voting and registration fraud, Chinese espionage, weaponization of the justice system, and scam centers across southeast Asia.
With the Supreme Court rejecting the administration’s executive order on birthright citizenship and its emergency request related to mail-in ballots, what is the DOJ’s strategy moving forward?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:
Attorney General Todd Blanche, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Attorney General Todd Blanche:
It’s good to be here.
Mr. Jekielek:
You have a new report out on weaponization of government; specifically, it’s a working group report. Give me a picture of what it’s all about.
Attorney General Blanche:
Yes, our anti-weaponization working group has been working on a number of projects over the past year and a half or so. And just today, on Monday, we released the newest report, which has to do with a lot of information that is not brand new, but it’s all put in one place about the school boards and what we saw happening. Unfortunately, for two or three years across the country, parents were either physically stopped from talking, verbally stopped from talking and speaking up about what was happening in their schools and with their kids, and even at times, arrested and prosecuted for standing up and talking.
Again, a lot of this has been reported, but what the DOJ [U.S. Dept. of Justice] did, what we did, is we went and looked inside to try to understand what went wrong. Like, how could this happen? How can it be that an activist organization can go to the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation] and the Department of Justice and encourage them to actually arrest and investigate parents who are speaking up for their kids and then have the DOJ actually issue a memo?
So the Attorney General issued a memo encouraging U.S. Attorney’s Offices and law enforcement to investigate this type of conduct. The conduct was parents showing up at school board meetings and voicing concerns about what was happening in their school district. It’s America, thank God. America has already learned that this happened and rejected it and said this can never happen again. But I hope that the American people read this memo and again, see how this happened, but then most importantly, how we’re going to make sure it never happens again.
Mr. Jekielek:
You know, one of the interesting things, it came out a half hour before we’re sitting down here. But one of the things I did notice is that as this Garland memo was being released, there was some kind of internal dissent actually happening in the DOJ. I thought that was really interesting.
Attorney General Blanche:
There should have been internal dissent. And so there were a handful of lawyers who raised their hands and said, I’m not sure we should be doing this. I’m not sure we should be encouraging our federal prosecutors around the country to be investigating school board meetings when there’s no evidence of federal crimes. And so, we did see that happen.
Unfortunately, their views didn’t carry the day, and the memo was still issued. But we wanted to make sure that the American people understood the work and the research that we did included understanding internally at the DOJ what happened and why the memo was issued. And we did find that there were lawyers within the department who said that this shouldn’t be something that the Department of Justice is focused on.
Look, the memo very quickly was rescinded. Attorney General Bondi officially rescinded it as well. The president issued an executive order on January 20th addressing it. So we’re not.We haven’t broken new ground today as far as changing the way that a policy works within the department. That was done last year; that’s been done.
But what we did today is we kind of put a final bow on our investigative work around looking into what happened and why it happened. And the American people should know that this will never happen again, and that we’ve put in place within the department not only good people but practices that will stop some outside leftist organization from being able to have access to leadership at the department and at the FBI to push this narrative not only onto the American people but onto federal law enforcement.
Mr. Jekielek:
Of course, this whole topic of weaponization is something that’s been, I guess, central or incredibly high priority for you. I know you’ve talked about that many times. Can you give me a bit of a picture, beyond, of course, this specific piece, which you just published about how things have gone? How have you been effective at challenging some of these weaponization realities?
Attorney General Blanche:
The most basic thing that we’ve done as leadership within the department, Attorney General Bondi, myself, and Director Patel, and our other leaders, the Criminal Division, and our U.S. attorneys, is we’ve gone back to just pushing our prosecutors and our leaders to go back to the basics of what we should be doing as a department. And that’s the priorities of getting drugs off our streets, going after cartels, stopping fraud, stopping illegal immigration, and stopping violent crime. If prosecutors and agents are working on those types of crimes, they don’t have time to meddle in places they shouldn’t be meddling in, which is what was happening over the past several years.
Remember, this anti-weaponization at its core started with what happened with the president and the last administration. But what we learned is, and that was an injustice that I was personally involved in, but that I’m happy to talk about if anybody has a question about my views of that. But what we learned beyond what happened to the president and his family and his company and anybody that knew him or worked with him or protected him, all of whom had their lives turned upside down by the last administration, was that there were other areas like the school board, like the prosecution of the FACE [Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances] Act against various peaceful protesters were again standing up as they are allowed to do under our Constitution.
We wanted to level up with the American people and say, we know we’ve lost your trust. We know the Department of Justice and the FBI, to some extent, and even other federal law enforcement, are now questioning the work that we’re doing. So, what we wanted to do with this working group is not only move forward and say, we’re going to go back to putting bad guys in jail; we’re going to go back to making your communities safe, but also make sure that we looked under our hood to understand why it happened.
Mr. Jekielek:
There was just an event recently around barfare or this weaponization of the system against lawyers, which was very prominent. I mean, one of the people immediately under you spoke. Can you just talk about that a little bit?
Attorney General Blanche:
We’ve done a lot in that space too. We do have activist bar organizations. Think about that: these are nonprofit organizations that are charged with making sure that lawyers practicing in a given state are qualified and otherwise meet whatever expectations the bar has. And we had jurisdictions, most notably Washington, D.C., where we know that there are individuals within that organization that are just activists against conservatives.
So, what does that mean for a lawyer? That means that if you are a lawyer who puts forward liberal causes, you are safe. Nothing will happen. If there are referrals against you, we filed multiple referrals against some of our own prosecutors who left. Trial attorneys who left at the beginning of the administration started talking about very confidential and privileged communications and things that they worked on while they were in the department—a blatant violation under any bar that you cannot do that. And to this point, the D.C. bar won’t even open an investigation.
But then you had somebody like Jeff Clark during the last administration who drafted a memo—a draft. It was never a finalized memo; it was a draft memo. So think about everything you’ve done in your life. Think about everything, if you’re watching this, a draft email you’ve sent, a draft memo you’ve written that you never sent. Okay, so it was never finalized. And because of that draft memo, he had to spend millions of dollars on legal fees. The D.C. bar disbarred him for a draft memo that he wrote while he was a DOJ employee, another DOJ employee to someone senior to him.
So, we’ve seen that in California. We’ve seen a little bit in New York, although not as bad. And so, this again isn’t about whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat or a conservative or a liberal. This is about institutions that are just not being fair, not being equitable in the way that they’re running their organizations. And so, we, the Department of Justice, no longer support the American Bar Association.
And what that means is I don’t allow anybody who works at the Department of Justice to speak or participate in those conferences in any sort of official capacity. Why? Because again, you have an organization that has been so activist in one direction over the past 25 years that it’s not fair. It’s not the right way to do things. So when it comes to them selecting judges, there’s a track record of the only time they find judges not qualified is if they happen to be conservative.
Okay, so think about that. There are some judges that ultimately are not qualified on both sides. I’ll give you that over the past 35 years. But yet, this one organization that the Senate Judiciary Committee charged with helping them evaluate and judge whether somebody should become a federal judge, was so partisan and one-sided. They weren’t doing their job for the Judiciary Committee. And so we said no more.
So judicial candidates are no longer required to, nor are they allowed to, meet with the ABA [American Bar Association]. So we are making progress and holding some of these organizations accountable. And I’ve said it before, but it’s worth saying here: this is not about me championing a conservative cause. This isn’t about me saying, I’m MAGA [Make America Great Again], or Republicans are right. This is literally about fairness.This is literally about organizations like the ABA and bar associations and the Department of Justice just being fair and appropriate and doing the right thing.
Mr. Jekielek:
Speaking of draft memos, I understand that you recently asked a pair of judges to recuse themselves from cases, presumably because they were being one-sided in the way that you described, or potentially being.
Attorney General Blanche:
Yes. So there’s a federal statute that allows a party to, if they are worried about a judge being biased, file a complaint with the circuit court of the district where that judge sits. And here we had almost an entire bench. So every single active judge except for one spoke to the New York Times. Two of the judges spoke on the record.
Okay, so there are judicial canons and a whole body of case law that make it clear that judges are not supposed to do that. So judges are supposed to speak about cases in opinions and from the bench, right? Not to the New York Times. And unfortunately, one of the judges was the then chief judge of the Minnesota court. And he went on the record. He posed for a photo with the New York Times. He talked about the work that DHS [U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security] and ICE [U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement] are doing in Minnesota and his personal views of it, his personal views of whether it’s right or wrong. And again, you’re entitled to your personal views, and so am I.
But when you’re bound by ethical constraints, like judges are, and then if you, in our view, violate those ethical obligations, so we filed a complaint against the entire bench because, again, every single one of them talked to the New York Times except for one, and we don’t know which one didn’t because some of them were anonymous. And we’ll see what the circuit court does. But this is something that we need judges who are going to be fair and impartial.
And by we, I don’t mean the Department of Justice. I mean we, the American people. And so when we have a case where we know that judges have stated their bias and personal views to the New York Times, we ask them to recuse themselves from any case involving DHS or ICE. That’s ongoing. Beyond what I just said, there’s not a whole lot more to say, but we want judges to be fair.
Mr. Jekielek:
When I read people’s reactions, even from people in our audience and so forth, to what DOJ is doing around weaponization, sometimes the question is, what is being done that has teeth that you think is actually shifting or that actually demonstrates concretely that there’s a major shift happening and that this sort of thing can’t happen again should administrations change, for example? What could you tell to our viewers that they would feel confident that that’s the case?
Attorney General Blanche:
There are some concrete things that are done. For example, there was a group of lawyers at Maine Justice [Robert F. Kennedy Dept. of Justice Building] since the 80s who focused on political cases, the Public Integrity Unit. Okay, we got rid of that. Because again, we wanted to remove any perception that there were politicized cases being brought in this department.
So that’s an example of a concrete thing. We started the National Fraud Division, a whole new unit of prosecutors committed only to combating fraud. That’s a concrete difference that the last administration and the administration before that, even President Trump’s first term, didn’t do.
So there are concrete examples, but the other, we just show our work. So when I do, I read that on X sometimes. Well, what are you guys actually doing? Well,I don’t know. The crime rate is the lowest rate that it’s been in generations. The murder rate is as low as it’s been since 1900.
By the way, that’s not all federal, that’s state and local too. But it’s the DOJ supporting law enforcement, backing the blue, going out and making sure that local law enforcement knows that we have their back if they need it. What are we doing? Your streets are safer. Walk around D.C.; it’s safer than it was a year ago. Walk around St. Louis, walk around Memphis, even states that are blue.
Our federal partners working with state and local are making a big difference. So if you were a concerned American and said, Todd Blanche, the attorney, what are you doing that’s different from what happened in the last administration? I’m happy to show my work. What we’re not doing is indicting somebody because of politics, and that makes some people upset.
Some people say, Biden did it, so you should do it too. But that’s not what President Trump has ever said. To me, that’s not what President Trump has told the American people. He said that he wants a Department of Justice that is doing the right thing and executing on their mission.
I don’t like the criticism that suggests that there’s something that we’re supposed to be doing that we’re not doing. I don’t mind criticism generally, but when the criticism is that we’re not doing something, our indictments are up, our arrests are up. We’re going after people. We also dismiss cases, consent decrees filed against police departments over the past 20 years.
There was a consent decree that’s been in existence since the 1980s. Every year, that organization had to give a million dollars to lawyers and forensics examiners, and the problem that existed in the ’80s was not even anywhere near what was going on now. So, we’re doing that sort of work in our civil rights space as well. We’re doing a lot of work. So, look, what we’re doing, there’s a lot of work that we have left to do. But we’re accomplishing a lot.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, I mean, if I understand you correctly, a key part is building the culture of equal application of the law.
Attorney General Blanche:
Absolutely. And building a culture. So, leadership, right? It starts with our leaders, it starts with our U.S. attorneys, with the folks that are leading at Main Justice. It starts with me and equal application of the law. And also, what is the Department of Justice’s role in the United States of America? It is not to regulate. It’s not to go and tell some company what we think they should be thinking about doing. It’s to investigate and prosecute and then defend in the civil space. That’s what our jobs are.
So if you’re an assistant U.S. attorney, and whether you’re working in New York City or Kansas or Texas, you have a mission that’s very clear from what Attorney General Bondi laid out and what I’ve continued to lay out, which is that you are making your streets safe. You’re going after drug dealers, you’re going after people who are here illegally, violent criminals, and anybody who’s committing any sort of fraud. If what you’re doing isn’t one of those four things, why?
There might be a reason. So I’m not saying that’s all we do, but really understand why you’re doing that case that isn’t focused on that mission. That culture is what we’re seeing, what we’re making sure exists in every U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Mr. Jekielek:
Part of the reason you got this job was because you were President Trump’s attorney back in the day. I understand that you had to create your own office, so to speak, to actually pursue that. Can you just tell me a little bit about your background?
Attorney General Blanche:
Yes. I was a federal prosecutor for a long time, then I left. I was in violent crimes. I put robbers and murderers in jail at the federal level for a decade. Then I became a defense attorney in New York, like many federal prosecutors do. I was at a pretty large law firm doing criminal defense work and white-collar criminal defense work. I had the opportunity to represent President Trump. I had represented some other political figures like Paul Manafort and Igor Fruman, and I was asked to represent President Trump. And that’s right, my firm said no.
My firm said that they weren’t willing to allow me to do that. I had the choice of moving on and saying, okay, I won’t represent the president, or just quitting. So I quit and started my own firm, and yes, that’s how I got to know the president. So there’s no doubt that had I not done that, somebody else would be the Attorney General today, for sure.
Mr. Jekielek:
What’s it like being one of these attorneys that represented the president? It’s a small group.
Attorney General Blanche:
It is. It’s a small group. It’s not small enough, but he’s the first former president to need as many lawyers as he did, that’s for sure. It was going through it; it was eye-opening. The lengths that folks would go to to go after him. And I will never stop talking about it. It was not just the multiple criminal indictments that were filed in Washington, D.C., in Florida, in New York by the District Attorney, but it was also a civil case by the New York Attorney General to try to destroy his entire family. She brought a case not only against the president, but against his company, against his children, and most of his kids were eventually kicked out, but not all of them were.
Alleging so much fraud that was basically totally made up. You hear the president talk about the judge valued Mar-a-Lago at $18 million. It’s worth somewhere between $400 million and a billion dollars. And so, yes, it was tough. Then they tried to keep him off the ballot, right? So nothing was working. The criminal cases in Atlanta, in New York, in D.C., in Florida, okay? Think about that. More than any criminal in history, a real criminal, you have four different jurisdictions going after him. Then you have the civil case. And then you have multiple states saying, wait, he can’t be on the ballot. It was incredible what the radical Left tried to do to our democracy when it came to President Trump.
However, there’s something so heartening and so amazing about the American people because, despite everything I just said, they still came out and voted for him, and he won what he calls, because it’s true, a historic election. There’s a group of about probably 10 of us that were representing him, the core group. Many of them are now in the administration. Our Solicitor General, John Sauer, represented the president. Will Scharf, now the White House counsel. Dave Warrington, the former White House counsel, myself, Stanley Woodward, the Associate Attorney General. I’m missing some, but there are a lot of folks that had the opportunity and privilege of representing the president or his closest associates who are now serving him in this administration.
Mr. Jekielek:
How would you respond to people that would say, hey, that’s being too close to the president. It’s too much on the president’s side when it comes to basically playing your role as the attorney general.
Attorney General Blanche:
First of all, it’s simply not true, right? So the idea that a criminal defense attorney, like I was for President Trump, has a chummy relationship with the president, he and I are—I respect him more than any man in the world. I hope he respects me, but he always knows that he will get an honest answer out of me, good or bad. And I am loyal to him, but every attorney general is loyal to the president because that’s exactly what we’re supposed to be under Article II.
I know that that criticism will never go away. I don’t golf with the president. I don’t go to his house for Christmas dinner. He’s someone I admire and respect. I think he’s the greatest president we’ve had in generations and generations. And I love working for him. I love being his defense attorney, being his Deputy Attorney General, and now I love being his Attorney General. So my whole relationship with him has been the honor of a lifetime.
But people can criticize. I mean, if I had never met him before, the criticism would be, the Attorney General brought in some—the President brought in some stranger who he doesn’t even know to be Attorney General. If I was his civil lawyer, they would complain about that. It’s not as if there could be an Attorney General that the critics will say, we’re okay with that person. So I don’t mind the criticism. It doesn’t even affect me one iota.
But I’m working every day for the American people, and it’s the greatest privilege that I’ll ever have in my lifetime. And so, if folks want to say I’m too close to the president, I used to be his lawyer, or somehow I can’t execute my duties because of my past, they’re free to say it. But I’ll just keep on doing my job.
Mr. Jekielek:
I want to dive into the discussion of election integrity because I know that’s something that’s a very high priority for the Department of Justice.Well, let’s start with this. Going into the midterms, where do you feel the biggest vulnerabilities are right now?
Attorney General Blanche:
I think it’s obvious. It’s making sure that the only people voting are eligible to vote and that we have assurance that that’s happening. So, when the president talks about something as basic as voter ID, an individual showing up to vote and saying, I am Todd Blanche, and then have somebody ask, okay, do you have a driver’s license? Can you prove that you are who you say you are? That would seem to be the most basic requirement to make sure that the person who’s casting that vote is casting it once and that he or she’s allowed to vote.
So that’s our biggest objective, and it goes to mail-in voting. So something as basic as a disgruntled former postal employee who throws away a bunch of mail and includes 200, over 200 ballots. That’s 200 ballots that are never going to get to the people that are supposed to vote. And we’ve charged nearly 100 people who are voting illegally. Either they’re here illegally and voting, or they have status here, but they’re not citizens and they’re voting. Every single week, we’re charging more and more. We’re going to keep on doing that. And what do you hear from the critics about that? Well, it’s not that many. Well, you’ve only charged 96 people. What does that matter?
But just think about the rationale there. We have hundreds and hundreds of investigations going on. We continually talk about New Jersey, the New Jersey governor.The state attorney general uncovered hundreds and hundreds of people illegally voting in New Jersey. At some point, even the critics have to say, okay. For months and months, it was, there’s no proof there’s anybody voting illegally. Then it was, okay, there’s a little bit of proof. And then we keep on coming up with more and more examples of it happening. We charged a case last week in Minnesota, where the defendants allegedly voted in this primary in 2026, in the primary that just happened in Minnesota, and they’re not eligible to vote.
And so at some point, the critics have to accept the fact that we have a problem, that we have to fix it, and I think it’s not a hard fix. The president talks about it all the time. There are things you can do just around the election, making sure that the person voting has an ID, is an American citizen, and is allowed to vote. That’s pretty basic. So that’s what we’re working on at the Department of Justice.
There are other things that we’re working on in the civil sense that Harmeet Dhillon’s working on, which is incredible, important work to really get deeper into voter rolls to make sure that there are not people illegally voting. It’s become a very partisan issue, and it shouldn’t be, because I don’t know why only Republicans care about one person, one vote. Democrats should too, and they say they do. And so I hope that at some point in the next, in the next several months, both sides can come together and realize we really need to change some of our fundamental voting practices.
Mr. Jekielek:
Just on this New Jersey case, in my notes, it’s 6,600 non-citizens being erroneously registered and about 400 ballots cast. As an example, are there other cases of this nature?
Attorney General Blanche:
There are 200 ballots that are thrown away. Okay, so I don’t know who those people were who were supposed to vote, but you can assume that some of them were planning on voting by mail, maybe all of them. And you can assume that some of them didn’t vote because they never got their ballot. So, yes, we have hundreds and hundreds of investigations going on. We’ve charged, I think, 15 different states over the past five weeks, individuals illegally voting in 15 states.
And so this isn’t an isolated issue in a particular state. It’s something that’s happening, I think, unfortunately, in a lot of states and a lot of places. And we also, make no mistake, we don’t catch everybody. We haven’t identified everybody that’s voting illegally. So the fact that you’ve identified several hundred in New Jersey, we have several, we’ve charged almost 100, we have several hundred investigations. It’s not as if that’s the end. And so, and by the way, these cases are very difficult to investigate and prosecute for DHS.
We have a great partnership with them. We work the cases very closely with their agents. If there were voter ID, there would be a lot less to investigate because you would be able to at least have the confidence that there is somebody checking that the person voting is eligible to vote and is the person that’s showing up to vote, or if it’s mail-in voting, safeguards around it so that you know that the person sending in their ballot is the person that’s supposed to be voting.
Mr. Jekielek:
Given the current state of affairs, how close do you think the United States is to having voter ID requirements everywhere?
Attorney General Blanche:
That’s a great question. And I know the president has said it repeatedly, and I’m sure he still says it today, he doesn’t understand why it won’t pass. How can it not pass? And so with these requirements, I think the only thing that I can do as Attorney General is continue to investigate and continue to try to expose and uncover examples where it’s been happening. I hope that Congress, that the Senate, that the House figure out a way to come together and get the votes to pass it. And, you know, we’ll see. There’s an election coming up. And then you got till the end of the year with this Congress. And then we’ll see what happens.
Mr. Jekielek:
Let’s jump to poll monitoring. This is something that’s been kind of in the air recently. I think there’s at least a thousand DOJ poll monitors that are going to be deployed. There were just talks of some of them being armed. I don’t know where that came from. I know you’ve responded to that. And there’s this question: Can DOJ agents seize ballots before they’re counted? And what would be the implications of that? And I just want to get you to speak to that.
Attorney General Blanche:
We know where this rhetoric about armed agents comes from. It comes from a certain pocket of mostly people on the left trying to scare Americans. There are no federal armed agents going to elections; there never are. On the bigger picture of whether the Department of Justice will monitor elections, yes. Like we’ve monitored every election since the 1960s, Republicans and Democrats. Every single election is monitored by the DOJ. And we’re not monitoring Republicans, we’re not monitoring Democrats, we’re monitoring elections in every state.
And what do we do? We’re there to make sure that federal law is followed. There are a number of laws that have been in place to make sure, again, that there’s election integrity. We are going to do that. We are going to make sure. Now, does that mean we’re seizing ballots? No, it doesn’t mean we’re seizing ballots. Does that mean we have armed men and women telling people to put their hands up when they go to vote? Of course not. No, we’re doing the same thing that every administration does, that every administration should do to make sure that in every polling place, American citizens have a right to exercise what is one of the most fundamental and most important things we do as citizens. And so we’re going to continue to do that.
By the way, there are lawsuits filed around every single election. Somebody files a lawsuit. There hasn’t been an election since at least the 60s where some lawsuit hasn’t been filed in some jurisdiction, whether it’s a polling place closes early, whether it didn’t have enough workers there, whatever the issue is in a given location, that’s okay. That’s democracy. That’s what we’re there for. That’s what the federal polling observers are there for. There are state and local observers that are there as well in most jurisdictions.
The American people can rest assured that we’re doing our job and doing the right thing and should reject anybody that’s claiming that there’s some strong arm from President Trump happening that’s inappropriate. There’s not. He’s doing exactly what every president has done and should do to make sure that the elections are safe and fair.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, I think in April of last year, the president asked for an investigation into illegal political donations on online platforms like ActBlue, and the House Judiciary Committee recently has something related to that. Jim Jordan has said that all five employees of ActBlue took the fifth when asked to explore these sorts of things. What is the DOJ doing with respect to looking at illegal, potentially illegal political donations?
Attorney General Blanche:
I can’t talk about any ongoing investigations, but just more generally, the real concern with some of these platforms is that they don’t have the compliance or the KYC [Know Your Customer] structures in place to make sure that the money coming in isn’t illegal. So, whether it’s foreign money, whether it’s money that exceeds the limits of what someone’s allowed to give, and whether they’re able to get around it because there’s not enough safeguards in place with the platforms. That’s where our focus is. And then if you find that there aren’t enough safeguards, is it intentional? So there were people behind the platform that knew that that was happening and that wanted it to happen to further an agenda, whatever it may be.
So that’s something we’re, of course, investigating. And I think President Trump was absolutely right to point that out, that that’s something important.The House Judiciary Committee, Chairman Jim Jordan, finished a very thorough investigation, which we now have; we’re working with them on, and that investigation’s ongoing, but it’s something that, again, this shouldn’t be a surprise. This is the type of conduct the Department of Justice should look at, right? We’re not supposed to have foreign money in our elections. And so if it’s happening, we need to figure out why and stop it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Or can we expect some sort of report on this soon from that request?
Attorney General Blanche:
I don’t think it will be a report because it’s an investigation. So, investigation, we’ll see what happens. I don’t want to kind of get ahead of the prosecutors or the FBI on that. But it is something that, and by the way, again, the criticism of how come it’s taking so long? Financial investigations are difficult and take time. Just getting security information back, getting information back from the companies, analyzing the information, and talking to the relevant witnesses and financial institutions isn’t easy, but we have good prosecutors working on it.
Mr. Jekielek:
And just jumping to mail-in ballots, because this has been a huge topic over the years. The Supreme Court declined to block the U.S. postal system’s rules governing mail-in ballots. Of course, you’ve been defending a bunch of these cases. Is the DOJ planning to keep pressing appeals around this? What’s the plan with mail-in ballots? And I guess you could even say, what’s the concern with mail-in ballots?
Attorney General Blanche:
The concern is that there’s not enough integrity around the process. So, if a state has authorized some sort of mail-in ballot procedure, is the procedure authorized consistent with federal law and federal standards? So, is it consistent to make sure that, again, the ballots are going to the right person who’s allowed to vote, and that the person who’s sending the ballot back in is that person. In our view, there are some concerns around that with some states. The Supreme Court, in part, because it was too close to this election, didn’t let us put in all the changes we wanted to put in with the Postal Service. But we’re going to, of course, continue to work on that, and not only for just one election; it’s for the elections to come.
Mail-in balloting became a major thing during COVID. It used to be a lot more sporadic, but it now seems to have taken over in every state. We have to make sure that there are safeguards around it, and by we, I mean it should be every state and local government, but certainly the federal government, to make sure that there’s a system in place that our Postal Service knows to help them make sure that any mail-in ballot, out or coming in, has safeguards around it to make sure that it’s, again, one person, one vote, and that the one person who did vote is allowed to vote.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, shifting gears, a topic that’s very interesting to us at The Epoch Times and our audience is, and you’re doing a lot of cases around this from what I can see, Chinese Communist Party [CCP] espionage and also transnational repression cases. You know, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China has produced a report this summer showing all sorts of examples of transnational repression. And I’ve read a lot of instances that it’s, for example, very difficult to identify in some cases because, for example, this last week, right?
There you have all these people that are, for example, attacking some of the protesters against the visit, right? But, you know, are those people acting exactly in line with what the Chinese Communist Party would want? But are they acting at their direction? Well, it’s unclear. There are just all these kinds of scenarios where existing statutes might not be ready to deal with this prevalent scenario.
Attorney General Blanche:
Yes. So this is a big priority of ours, as it should be. You’re right. There’s a difference between voicing your views and opinions and acting at the direction and under the control of, for example, China, in what you’re doing, whether it’s trying to tamp down on dissidents and even using physical violence, at what point has it become a federal crime? And that’s something that we investigate. We’ve charged a number of individuals over the past year with those crimes. The East District of New York charged several cases. So did the U.S. Attorney’s Office in California as well.
It’s something that isn’t new. It’s been happening for a long time, but it still continues to happen. And whether it’s using social media, which is a very powerful tool that the Chinese government has been able to utilize, again, illegally in some cases, or paying, whether it’s actual financial money going to individuals to actually, whether it’s just oppress an individual or even worse, harass and physically go after, is a very serious issue, and you’ve seen our track record. There’s been a lot of ongoing cases and arrests in that space, and I think you should expect that to continue to extend to the extent that the conduct continues.
Mr. Jekielek:
There’s just one case I wanted to touch on. There was a man charged in Brooklyn for operating one of these Chinese police stations, as they’re called. I mean, actually, in this case, the man was tasked with busing people to D.C. back in the day. This wasn’t this visit, right, for a previous visit of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, encountering Falun Gong demonstrations and other things. And I guess I’m trying to understand, is this a kind of a blueprint? Is this the type of approach that the DOJ is planning to take?
Attorney General Blanche:
It depends on the conduct, right? That was a very extreme, you’re right, that was an extreme case and a very stark case of when that conduct happens. But it depends. So it depends on what we can prove, on what the evidence showed. Some of these cases are very difficult to charge criminally because it isn’t obvious that the person doing it is violating the law as opposed to just exercising the rights that we hold dear in this country.
Mr. Jekielek:
Or you’ll have another example: institutions that are closely associated, known to be United Front operations, and are suspected to be so, for example, pay a whole bunch of people to come. Is that, you know, and I don’t know what statute really has to say that. Is that a crime?
Attorney General Blanche:
Is that a crime? In isolation, no, it’s not a crime. But if they’re doing it with the motivation to actually exact harm or improper influence, or lobby the government without registering, then it gets into the area where it’s something that we need to be investigating and prosecuting.
Mr. Jekielek:
The big question, I guess, I have ultimately is, do you feel like the statutory reality, in a way, is ready for this? Because this is even something that we’ve only begun to really understand, unfortunately, relatively recently, how this United Front Work Department operates, how these sorts of influence and espionage operations and transnational operations sometimes all together function.
Attorney General Blanche:
I’m not here advocating for more criminal laws. I think that you’re right that this is a new area, but I do think that our existing laws are more than enough. And remember, we work with Treasury and Commerce, so whether it’s sanctions that accompany arrests, which can actually put a lot of pressure on whatever financial institution or whatever institution is actually paying it. So it’s not just criminal arrests and putting handcuffs on people, it’s also using the Treasury and other tools that we have to stop this conduct.
Yes, you’re right. This is an area that is complicated because not only do you have to know the motivation behind it, but it’s also hard to catch. Once you catch one, there are a lot of others. But that’s why we’re here. That’s why you have the FBI and that’s why you have the Department of Justice.
Mr. Jekielek:
So, just on the area of these scams, I had the FBI director on the show a while back. We talked; we centered on breaking down a lot of these scam centers the DOJ has seized, from what I know, billions of dollars of American money, and even some other people have been scammed. How is the process of getting some of that money back to people who have been scammed?
Attorney General Blanche:
It’s ongoing. So, in those cases, we have seized it, but it’s frozen. You know, a judge has to—there’s a whole legal process where a judge has to determine who gets the money, who owns the money. And so then that’s like any litigation, it takes time. Ultimately, the goal is to return all that money, as much of that money as we can, to the victims of these scams. And then, if there’s money left over, it would go into the Treasury for other victims, for the victim’s funds. That’s right, scam centers are a major problem, most meaningfully because most of the victims are U.S. citizens.
So you have these scam centers, entire towns operating in Southeast Asia, and their whole existence is to scam Americans. And yes, they target Europeans as well, and even Australians. But the main profit center for them is American citizens. And within the citizenry, it’s our elderly and our most vulnerable that are actually being scammed. And so Director Patel, that’s right, Director Patel spends a ton of time fighting that. DHS spends a ton of time fighting that.
The White House, the President issued an executive order about it because it is a big issue, and our prosecutors are prosecuting all the time, almost weekly, some of these guys that are running these scam centers. But again, the money is flowing in crypto, it’s flowing through PayPal, through Zelle, all these kind of off-financial ways to get the money out of the United States into the hands of these criminals. And so when we are able to seize the money or seize the accounts or seize the wallets, we do it.But then there’s a process that allows us to actually get the money and be able to return it to the victims.
Mr. Jekielek:
There was a report from Anthropic not too long ago with examples of Chinese intelligence officials basically using Claude to monitor religious dissidents, civil society, and so forth. And is the DOJ looking at this?
Attorney General Blanche:
What are we looking at in that situation, if it becomes criminal, absolutely. I did read that report, and I think that there are a lot of good actors that are using Claude and AI and our super intelligence in a way that will make this country great. There are bad actors too, just like in every new emerging technology.
Our goal as the Department of Justice, as the President has talked about, is to make sure we’re the leader in superintelligence, but also to make sure that we’re going after bad actors. And so, if that conduct becomes criminal, which it very well could be, we’ll treat it like any other crime. And we do have the tools to prosecute that. We do have existing criminal statutes that let us go after somebody that was using AI to actually commit a crime.
Mr. Jekielek:
You know, since we’re on the topic of China writ large, birthright tourism, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s birthright citizenship order. And of course, there’s, you know, kind of, and I think the Supreme Court said there needs to be a statute if there’s going to be some sort of changes to how we do this stuff. Do you have any update on the DOJ’s efforts? Because I know that’s something that’s important to use the existing statute around this issue.
Attorney General Blanche:
The Supreme Court struck down the broad executive order around birthright citizenship, but they also made it clear that there were certain circumstances when there were certain safeguards that we could put in place to make sure that the people getting citizenship should be getting citizenship. So we’re working with the Supreme Court decision to make sure that we’re doing everything we can to stop, for example, people coming to this country just to have a kid. And birthing tourism, by the way, is a whole separate problem and something that we’ve investigated; we’ve charged cases.
Recently, some of these travel agencies that are not really travel agencies are just trying to arrange for people to get visas to come in here and have babies. And there are things that I think DHS is working on, whether it’s making sure that folks coming here are honest about why they’re coming here. And if they’re not honest, we can use that against them if they ever try to become a citizen, if they come here only to give birth. And so, the Supreme Court didn’t give us what we wanted in that case, but they made it clear that President Trump and the executive can regulate and can work very hard at keeping out people that are just coming in here to have kids, to have babies. And so that’s what we’re doing.
So, birthing tourism remains a problem, especially in certain parts of the country. And almost all of those are criminal, right? So, because within the visa process, within the application process, whether it’s the person running the travel agency or the pregnant person coming, there are questions asked that are answered dishonestly during that process. And so, again, those cases are not easy. Those cases can be difficult to prove, but that’s not slowing us down. So we’re working with DHS and HSI [Homeland Security Investigations] agents and CBP [U.S. Customs and Border Protection] to strengthen and tighten up the questions that we’re asking.And then the result of that will be if folks still try to come in here just to have a baby, to come to this country to have a baby, they will be held accountable.
Mr. Jekielek:
Are you hoping for something in this case from Congress, or do you also believe that the existing statute is?
Attorney General Blanche:
Listen, I don’t operate hoping things happen with Congress. As the Attorney General, I would spend a lot of time with lots of hopes and dreams. So, of course, Congress works hard, and if they pass something, that’s great. But in the meantime, I’ll just use the tools that I have.
Mr. Jekielek:
On an unrelated issue, the DOJ has secured deals with six hospitals ending this kind of transgender or sex-rejecting treatments, as they’re called now, for minors. Is that something you’re doing with more hospitals?
Attorney General Blanche:
Yes, it’s not six hospitals, it’s thousands of hospitals, it’s like multiple hospital systems. But many of these hospital systems have hundreds, dozens and dozens of hospitals across their state. We announced just last week in New York and Pennsylvania. Yes, we’re doing that everywhere, and by the way, successfully.
What was happening was awful. It was horrible. You had pediatric gender-affirming care centers. We are stopping that. That’s not something that should be happening. The agreements that we’re making with these hospital systems will last long beyond the time that I’m Attorney General. Most of the agreements are for a decade or longer. So we’re really putting them out of business and we are continuing. We have other cases ongoing, we’re hoping for additional agreements. Like, remember, these hospital systems are just agreeing to this. They’re reaching a settlement with us. And so that’s the best way to get things done. And that’s what we’re going to continue to do.
Mr. Jekielek:
As we finish up, a couple of questions. One of them is you’ve talked about how it’s difficult for you to get the message out about what the DOJ has accomplished. We talked about it a little bit here, but just in general, you’ve talked about how some of the media reporting has not been fair. Okay. So I just, so what are some things you want to tell the American people about how, beyond what we’ve just talked, we already talked about?
Attorney General Blanche:
We talked about it a lot today, but I think that it is very easy to read the news coming out of Washington, D.C. about the Department of Justice and only see negative things. For example, there’s an example that just happened the past few days. There was a judge that put in a U.S. attorney out in Washington, even though the president had fired him and said, no, I’m going to force you to put this U.S. attorney in. Within 10 minutes of the judge issuing that ruling, every DOJ reporter that works at the Department of Justice had inquired from our media people about what our response was and immediately put it up as a major news story.
Now, in our view, that’s a lawless ruling. Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit agreed with us and immediately stayed it. Okay. Do you think that you got the same immediate reaction from the media announcing the stay, announcing that it wasn’t happening, that you got on Friday when it happened? No.
So the biggest issue that I think the American people should hold the media accountable on is that it’s very easy to broadcast when something bad happens, but there should be the same vigor and enthusiasm broadcasting when the Department of Justice gets victories, when a court of appeals reverses something that a district court judge does, when we get arrests and convictions. Those are things that are just as important to the fabric of our nation as reporting on some gossip about somebody that got fired.
My message when I meet with prosecutors, when I meet with law enforcement, when I meet with state and local government officials, is always the same, which is we have great prosecutors across the country, and they are working hard every single day to, again, what we talked about earlier, go back to the basics: putting bad guys in jail, keeping your community safe, arresting fraudsters, arresting drug dealers. That is what we are doing, and that’s where we’re having a tremendous amount of success. And at some point, I say, the media will start reporting it.
Mr. Jekielek:
Well, Attorney General Todd Blanche, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.
Attorney General Blanche:
It’s great. Thank you for inviting me on. I appreciate it. It was great.
This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.
