SerpApi.Org
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche spent about an hour Thursday afternoon at the Justice Department with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein's abuse. The meeting resolved nothing. Blanche told reporters afterward that the meeting was not entirely cordial because the survivors wanted "some form of justice" he did not believe he could deliver. The survivors described deflection and no credible plan for accountability.
That meeting did not deliver justice. It did show that advice and consent still mean something when a senator treats his vote as leverage rather than a ceremony.
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where the arithmetic on this nomination is tight. With Democrats opposed, his vote could determine whether the committee advances Blanche at all. On Wednesday, Blanche cited ethical restrictions on meeting directly with survivors who have lawyers, while insisting the department had dealt with their representatives. On Thursday, survivors testified that their requests had gone unanswered. Tillis drew a line. He said he had not made a final decision, and then he said he expected the meeting to happen before the committee marks up the nomination. "I'm trying to get to yes," he told the room.
Getting to yes is not the same as getting out of the way. Tillis told reporters he wanted to create a forcing mechanism to make sure the meeting took place. The forcing mechanism worked in about six hours. Blanche was at the Justice Department by 4:30 that afternoon. Tillis then posted that he appreciated the willingness to sit down and listen, which is roughly the opposite of a victory lap.
Tillis can be theatrical, like most lawmakers. I worked for him in the Senate, and I have disagreed with him sharply in the years since, especially over President Donald Trump, the MAGA movement, and whether some of his positions reflected the North Carolina voters who sent him there. That history makes me less, not more, likely to offer reflexive praise. This was not theater. It was conviction, backed by leverage. Tillis stated a condition, attached his vote to it, and produced action the same day. That combination of leverage and blunt language has become its own small genre in North Carolina politics. Only Tillis would tell a hearing room he wanted “to stick a fork in this turkey of a 1776 fund” and make a dispute over settlement mechanics sound like a county fair.
The substance here is worth separating from the personality. The condition Tillis set was not ideological. He did not demand a policy concession, a nomination trade, or a promise about the Epstein files. He asked a man seeking to run the Justice Department to spend an hour with survivors who had been asking that department to hear them directly. That is a low bar. The fact that it took the threatened loss of a committee vote to clear it is the story.
Confirmation hearings have become theater in both parties. Senators arrive with prepared speeches, extract a clip, and vote the way leadership expected before the hearing even began. What Tillis did runs against that current. He identified something a nominee could deliver, he attached his vote to it, and he let the nominee decide. Blanche decided. The system did what the civics textbook says it does, which happens rarely enough now to be worth naming.
Tillis is not the only Republican with questions. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) remains unsettled about the $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund that Blanche created as part of the settlement of Trump's lawsuit against the IRS. Blanche testified under oath that he rescinded the document establishing it and that the fund is dead. Republicans still want a guarantee that it cannot be revived, because the settlement itself has not been altered. That question will not be answered by a meeting, and the markup is two weeks out. Tillis has not said how he will vote, and anyone claiming to know is guessing.
EPSTEIN VICTIMS UNSATISFIED AFTER MEETING WITH TODD BLANCHE: ‘CHECKING A BOX’
North Carolinians who follow Tillis closely have watched this pattern before. He opposed the president's major tax and spending bill over its Medicaid provisions. He helped end Ed Martin's nomination to be U.S. attorney in Washington. He announced last summer that he would not seek a third term, and that announcement freed him from the calculation that keeps most senators quiet. Freedom of that kind usually produces noise. In Tillis, it has produced something closer to a work ethic, applied to the part of the job nobody claps for.
The Senate will replace Tillis in January with someone. It will not easily replace a member willing to spend the leverage of a committee vote on a meeting whose outcome he could not control and whose political benefit was uncertain. It put survivors in a room with the man who wants to run the Justice Department. They came out unconvinced, and whether the meeting mattered is for them to judge. That it happened at all is on Tillis.
Colton Overcash is the founder of Vertex Strategies, a Charlotte-based government relations and strategic advisory firm with a presence in Washington, D.C. He previously served in a presidential appointment at the Department of Homeland Security during the Trump administration and is a former staffer in the offices of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and U.S. Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC).
