By David Morgan and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff
WASHINGTON, Aug 5 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Todd Blanche, faced renewed uncertainty over his U.S. Senate confirmation on Wednesday after Republican Senator Susan Collins said on Tuesday she would vote against him, leaving Trump’s former personal lawyer with little margin for error.
With Republican Senator Mitch McConnell out indefinitely, Blanche can afford only one more Republican defection. Senators Bill Cassidy and Lisa Murkowski, who previously expressed reservations about his nomination, declined to comment on their vote on Wednesday. A small number of other senators have also expressed concern about Blanche’s nomination.
Blanche, now serving as acting attorney general, persuaded Republican holdouts John Cornyn and Thom Tillis to support him by pledging in writing that Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund was dead and that a related tax-immunity deal applied only to past tax returns. Both arose from a settlement of Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.
Questions remain about whether the fund could later be revived and why the president would receive a deal from his own administration that could personally save him millions of dollars
Senate Republican Leader John Thune said he wants to confirm Blanche before the chamber leaves Washington for a month-long recess scheduled to begin this week. A vote could come in a matter of days.
“We’re having conversations with folks, the small number of people who will be undecided in this, and I’m hopeful we’ll get there,” Thune told reporters on Wednesday. “But again, it’s a work in progress, and we’re not there yet.”
A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Wednesday afternoon, Blanche met behind closed doors with Cassidy and Murkowski in the U.S. Capitol. But they emerged from the discussion with no sign that either lawmaker had shifted position on his nomination.
“It was a good conversation that Senator Cassidy and I had. It was a good sit-down. I’m going to be processing a lot of what we just discussed, so we’ll go from there,” Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, told reporters.
Cassidy reiterated that he does not plan to reach a decision until the vote. “The fact that we were there long enough means we had a good conversation,” the Louisiana Republican told reporters.
(Reporting by David Morgan and Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff; Editing by Andy Sullivan, Howard Goller and Cynthia Osterman)
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