Sheldon Whitehouse Profile picture
Jul 31 11 tweets 3 min read Read on X
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave . . . .” AG nominee Todd Blanche is snarled deep in a tangled web of his own making, and he and Republicans are covering up the messy tangle. That won’t last. The mess is too thick. The stink is too rank.

🧵
1. Everybody hates both Trump’s crooked slush fund AND the crooked Trump family tax fraud amnesty, so Blanche weaseled a false answer that the slush fund was “DEAD.” But he wouldn’t put in writing. That’s a tell in general, and with lawyers’ weasel words in particular.
2. For instance, all Blanche said was that the Fund was dead and would not be set up. How do you weasel around that? Add one more collusive codicil to the crooked deal, and there’s a brand new vehicle for the $$$. “Hey, I said we wouldn’t use ‘the Fund,’ and we didn’t.”
3. Tillis and Cornyn trying to extract an actual end to the slush fund and the Trump tax fraud amnesty, and being rebuffed, proves that the promise was false. Trump wants BOTH, and weasel Blanche is stuck with his client’s decision. So he squirms. And lies.
4. He pretends he’s had no communication with “Trump’s lawyers.” Strange, since someone for DOJ “negotiated” the “deal.” Strange, since Trump’s lawyers spoke for DOJ in a pleading. Strange, since the federal judge found there was “collusion,” which takes both sides.
5. The slush fund was established in a document negotiated and signed between Blanche (signed by his stooge) and “Trump’s lawyers.” Where are the communications around that, which Blanche says he didn’t have?

Where’d the deal come from? Was it immaculate conception?
6. It gets thicker if someone appeals. Blanche (very weirdly) filed no DOJ pleadings in the case, probably to evade disciplinary action for the collusive “fraud on the court” problem he has. If he enters an appearance to appeal, BOOM, he’s solidly under the court’s authority.
7. If he doesn’t enter an appearance, and the “Trump lawyers” appeal for him, it’s a new chapter in the collusion. They have to practice in that court, and one of Trump’s lawyers has already been referred for bar discipline there, so they have their own problems to worry about.
8. Either way, the federal judge found collusion and sent her decision to NY Bar authorities, where Blanche already faces a complaint. Their investigation could expose the web. The judge reserved decision on “fraud on the court”; she too could investigate. And the Florida Bar.
9. The documents behind the scenes between the White House, “Trump’s lawyers,” and Blanche’s crooked DOJ as this collusive scam was cooked up, will be telling — likely damning. We’ve demanded the documents be preserved. No shredding, kiddies.
whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/w…
“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Blanche had to lie, and lie about lies, and walked himself into box canyons of lying. They’re hiding documents, pretending they don’t exist, which would only worsen the collusion. The truth will out.

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More from @SenWhitehouse

Jul 26
Big 3:

Here are the Big Three problems we need to keep in focus, problems which have corroded our democracy, and need urgent repair to restore government “of the People, by the People, and for the People”:
1.  Get the rotten dark money out of our politics. I’ve watched dark money redirect Congress away from voters, instead to big special interests with the motives and means to feed the big, crooked dark money machine.
2.  Defeat the fossil fuel industry’s climate denial fraud operation and its dark money corruption operation. Those crooked operations have dominated Congress for far too long, and the price to us of their political influence is way too high.
Read 6 tweets
Jul 24
Now that the smoke has mostly cleared from Canada’s wildfires, let’s try to clear some of the bogus smoke ABOUT Canada’s wildfires, particularly Trump’s fossil-fuel-friendly denial that climate change has anything to do with it.
Is it “bad forest management”? Canada’s forest is over 900 million acres. The entire continental US is 1.9 billion acres. They’re supposed to “manage” a forest half the size of the whole Lower 48? Grow a brain.
Plus, it’s wilderness. As in wild. As in without roads. For normal people, a vast wilderness still existing on our planet is a good thing. So the notion of “managing” this vast wilderness is too stupid to be real.
Read 9 tweets
Jul 14
Well, I told you to watch the Florida proceedings about whether a “fraud on the court” was committed in the slush fund case, and we now have the federal judge’s decision, and it’s a doozy.

Here’s how she framed the question:

🧵
Whether Trump and the defendants “ignored ethical norms, court rules, and legal authority to manipulate the judicial process …. to gild their efforts to gain unprecedented access to the public fisc with the patina of legitimacy.”
Punchline: they did. “Plaintiffs [Trump et al] improperly employed this lawsuit to justify … access to taxpayer funds and exemption from audits and other investigations … accomplished by leveraging control over Defendants [Blanche et al].”
Read 17 tweets
Jul 1
For most of our American history, Congress set up agencies and commissions to deal with complex and specialized questions. 

We made them expert, independent and often bipartisan. 

Every single one of the fifty states has done the same at some point.

It worked.

🧵
Expertise helped them resist being tricked by industry. Independence (“quasi,” anyway) helped them resist corrupt influence. 

Bipartisanship steadied the ship. Yup, it worked. 

America became a global leader in regulated areas (securities and pharmaceuticals, e.g.).
Six extremists on the billionaire-built Supreme Court just upended that: ninety years of its own precedent, and over 100 years of practice, reliance and success.

They think they know better, than Congress, the people, their own predecessors, and all fifty states.
Read 9 tweets
Jun 25
A new chapter in a sordid saga opened this week with the DC Circuit agreeing to reconsider, en banc, the decision of a 2-1 divided panel regarding contempt of court at senior levels of the MAGA DOJ. 

The full DC Circuit will now weigh in.

🧵
This began with the midnight deportations ordered halted by Judge Boasberg, which continued anyway. In that matter, MAGA DOJ thug Emil Bove reportedly said lawyers should be ready to tell the judge to “f*** off.”
DOJ’s noncompliance caused the judge to open an inquiry into possible contempt of court. In that contempt proceeding, Emil Bove might have had to testify, and his conduct would have been scrutinized.
Read 11 tweets
Jun 12
We have a President who is petrified of the truth getting out about his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Many questions remain.

🧵
nytimes.com/2026/06/10/mag…
Lisa Bloom, who likely knows as much as anyone about the credibility of the accusations against Trump, says “the man who is mentioned probably more than anyone else in the Epstein files should be subpoenaed to testify: Donald Trump.”
thedailybeast.com/lawyer-for-don…
Bloom’s firm represented Jane Doe 4, the woman who accused both Trump and Epstein of assaulting her when she was underage, as well as another Trump accuser in 2016.
Read 12 tweets

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