There’s more than one reason that Todd Blanche should not be attorney general of the United States. You’ll be hearing plenty about them in the days and weeks ahead, following President Donald Trump’s nomination of his former criminal defense lawyer to lead the Department of Justice.

One way to view the nominee is through a single word: “tainted.”

That’s how a judge described Blanche’s investigation into Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who became a prime target of the administration’s crudely incompetent deportation regime last year. The Trump-controlled government illegally sent Abrego to El Salvador in violation of a court order, then resisted additional court orders for his return, and then finally secured his return but only to greet him with an indictment that a judge recently dismissed as unconstitutionally vindictive.

It’s rare for judges to grant vindictive prosecution motions, but the actions of Blanche and his colleagues made it possible. Indeed, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw emphasized that he didn’t reach the conclusion “lightly” in his ruling last month.

But in dismissing the charges of illegally transporting undocumented immigrants, to which Abrego had pleaded not guilty, Crenshaw wrote that “absent Abrego’s successful lawsuit challenging his removal to El Salvador, the Government would not have brought this prosecution.” The Obama-appointed judge recalled that the government had closed its investigation into the Tennessee traffic stop at the center of the case in 2022. It was only reopened after Abrego succeeded in vindicating his right to remedy his illegal removal.

Crenshaw singled out the blundering of Blanche, who is currently the acting attorney general after Pam Bondi’s departure. He was deputy attorney general at the time of the Abrego probe. “Absent Blanche’s tainted investigation,” Crenshaw wrote in his May 22 ruling, Abrego’s illegal indictment would not have happened.

The judge noted that Blanche said in a Fox News interview that the executive branch only started investigating Abrego after a judge in Maryland “questioned” the decision to deport him illegally.

In fact, Crenshaw’s dismissal ruling was only made possible by his previous finding that Abrego could proceed with discovery into potential vindictiveness. Blanche played a starring role in that incremental ruling last year, where Crenshaw wrote, “Deputy Attorney General Blanche’s remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Abrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights to bring suit against the Executive Official Defendants, rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct.”

Therefore, Blanche has not only acted as an instrument for Trump’s revenge but has done so in a manner that has thwarted that revenge’s success. To be sure, Blanche is a competent attorney, but he has chosen what might be termed a “tainted” path. If the GOP-controlled Senate confirms him to the top job full time, then a microscopically dim silver lining could be that his continued service to Trump will result in further fumbles.

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President Donald Trump will have another case coming to the Supreme Court from his personal docket. This one relates to the defamation lawsuit he filed against CNN over the network’s use of the phrase “big lie” regarding his claims about the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden.

In March, the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit declined to consider his case, after a three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld a district judge’s ruling against him. Two of the three judges from the unanimous panel ruling were Trump appointees, as was the district judge who dismissed Trump’s suit in 2023. The judge did so on the grounds that the statements at issue were opinion, not factually false statements, and that Trump hadn’t shown that CNN acted with “actual malice.”

Trump argued that CNN’s use of the “big lie” phrase was intended to associate him with Adolf Hitler and Nazi propaganda. But the appellate panel deemed his claim “unpersuasive,” calling his assumption that the term is clear enough to be a factual statement “untenable.” It called his other claims “meritless.”

The March denial from the full appeals court put the president on the clock to petition the justices if he wanted a chance at saving the case. A filing this month to the high court confirms that he will be petitioning the justices, but not quite yet. The filing said his petition is due June 15 but he wants an extension to Aug. 14. Such extensions are routinely requested and granted. The request was made specifically to Justice Clarence Thomas, which is also routine because Thomas is the justice assigned to field administrative requests like this from the 11th Circuit.

In his extension request, Trump’s personal lawyers appeared to re-up his rigged-election claims that he has continued to press. Previewing the petition they intend to file, they said the network’s “allegations were false, but were perceived as historical fact by large segments of CNN’s audience. In reality, President Trump was lawfully pursuing then-unresolved, and now proven, claims about election irregularities in the 2020 presidential election.” The filing does not appear to detail the “irregularities” or how they have been “proven.”

On top of the many high court cases related to his administration, the promised petition will only be the latest one from the president’s personal docket. He is already pursuing an appeal in the E. Jean Carroll litigation, in which he is vying to upend the millions of dollars in damages she won after a jury found him civilly liable for sexually abusing and defaming her. The justices have not yet decided whether they are going to review his Carroll appeal, which involves two separate petitions, one of which has been pending for months and another that his lawyer said should be filed soon.

Separately, a petition is pending against CNN in another Trump-related defamation case. The petition was brought by Alan Dershowitz over the network’s coverage of his representation of Trump during his first impeachment trial in his first term. Like Trump in his CNN case, Dershowitz has lost in the lower courts. The justices have not yet decided whether they will review Dershowitz’s petition.

It takes at least four justices to agree to grant review.

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