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President Donald Trump conceded Thursday he may pull his own attorney general nominee rather than give two outgoing Republican senators what they are demanding.
Trump made the admission on Truth Social after the Senate Judiciary Committee postponed a vote on acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's nomination Wednesday night. The vote was canceled when it became clear two Republicans would block it.
Those two senators — Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) — are leaving Congress at the end of the year.
"Todd Blanche is a STAR, and everyone knows it!" Trump wrote on Truth Social. "He has the potential to go down as one of the Greatest Attorney Generals of All Time."
"I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd's name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office," Trump wrote.
Trump also attacked both senators directly, calling them men "whose political careers have been ended by my action" — a reference to his decision not to endorse them. He added that "both Cornyn and Tillis voted for Merrick Garland," invoking former Attorney General Merrick Garland, a name Republicans cite as a symbol of Democratic overreach.
On Capitol Hill Thursday morning, Cornyn told reporters the situation had taken a turn for the worse. Asked whether Blanche could be confirmed before the August recess, he said the odds were against it.
"It's looking doubtful," Cornyn told reporters, according to NBC News congressional reporter Laura Weiss.
Cornyn said talks with Blanche had been "very constructive" and that he believed a deal was close Tuesday night. But by Thursday morning, something had shifted.
"Other people intervening," he said. He told NBC News congressional correspondent Julie Tsirkin he did not know whether the president himself was standing in the way.
At the heart of the standoff is a settlement Trump's Department of Justice reached with the Internal Revenue Service. The deal granted Trump and his family immunity from tax audits and created a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who said they had been targeted by the government for political reasons.
The fund was later abandoned, but Cornyn wants that abandonment in writing — and wants the audit immunity narrowed so it does not cover future tax filings, according to MS NOW.
"All I want them to do is to confirm what he said in his sworn testimony before the Judiciary Committee, with regard not only to the weaponization fund, but also who is protected from future audits and what agencies of the federal government are bound by the release," Cornyn told reporters, according to CBS News.
The Department of Justice, Cornyn said, had not delivered. "They've simply refused to cooperate," he said, according to The Hill.
As of Thursday morning, Cornyn said he was waiting on a DOJ response to his latest offer and had no meetings or calls scheduled with the White House or the Department of Justice.
The Trump administration's newly launched "mega master" court system has quickly devolved into mass chaos that leaves defendants, guards, lawyers and judges "terrified," according to a new report.
"Attorneys and former judges say mega master hearings serve as the latest tool for the Trump administration to deport large numbers of people," the Chicago Sun-Times reported Friday. "This time by causing chaos and confusion in the courts."
Courtroom 11 at Chicago's immigration court barely seats 25 people — but one July morning saw 60 people, mostly unrepresented asylum seekers, crammed in wall-to-wall by 9:10 a.m., the Sun-Times reported.
This is a "mega master" calendar hearing, a new procedural format instituted by the Trump administration at the end of May that packs between 100 and 185 people into a single judge's morning docket — up from an average of just 30 before the change.
Chicago's courthouse at 55 E. Monroe has logged more of these mass hearings than any other immigration court in the country, according to immigration scholar Austin Kocher.
The scale has created conditions former immigration judges call dangerous.
On days when multiple mega hearings are scheduled simultaneously, hundreds of people — including families with strollers — spill into hallways narrower than an adult's arm span, waiting for hours to be called.
On one recent Thursday, roughly 200 people queued in the heat outside courtrooms designed to hold a fraction of that number.
"This is not good," one guard was overheard saying. Former judges have raised concerns that the overcrowded hallways amount to a fire hazard.
Attorneys and former judges argue the hearings serve to discourage immigrants from showing up at all, then fast-tracking deportations for those who don't.
In June, for the first time since 2019, more immigrants missed their Chicago court dates than attended — 58 percent of the 10,370 people summoned nationwide in June were marked absent, according to data from the nonprofit Mobile Pathways. Missing court can trigger an automatic in absentia deportation order.
Compounding the pressure, notice periods have collapsed. Median lead time for a Chicago hearing fell to just 34 days in June, down from 229 days in May.
The Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts, says the expanded scheduling is meant to clear long-standing backlogs.
But former judge Elizabeth Treacy, who resigned in June after presiding over three mega hearings with up to 150 people each, said the volume makes errors — and injustice — nearly inevitable.
She noted that indigenous asylum seekers with limited Spanish fluency are especially unlikely to speak up when they don't understand proceedings in a crowded, intimidating room.
“It’s not a coincidence, but another tactic to facilitate deportations,” said Stephanie Spiro, an attorney with the National immigration Justice Center.
“It’s much more efficient for the government to deport people without even having to read any briefs, without having to have a full hearing, without having to schedule hundreds of people, and actually listen to their claims, and afford them due process.”
That fear caused Carolina, an immigrant from Venezuela who just gave birth, to question whether she should show up for her hearing.
She and her husband eventually decided to risk deportation and bring their three children to court.
“I was terrified," she said.
