Former Attorney General John Ashcroft clashed with Sen. Adam Schiff during Todd Blanche's confirmation hearing, rejecting the claim that prosecuting lawbreakers who happen to be presidential enemies amounts to weaponization.
The exchange came at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Blanche's nomination as attorney general. Schiff, a California Democrat, pressed Ashcroft about Blanche allegedly stating that the president has both the right and the duty to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies. Blanche disputed that characterization, but Schiff asked Ashcroft if he agreed with it.
Ashcroft didn't budge.
They do not become exempt from following the law merely by their enmity to the President of the United States.
"I believe that the Attorney General of the United States has the right and responsibility to enforce the law uniformly, and if the law has been broken by the president's enemies, he has a duty," Ashcroft said. "They do not become exempt from following the law merely by their enmity to the President of the United States. As a matter of fact, the people who break the law are in enmity with the people of the United States, whose expression of what is the law has been developed in this body in the Congress of the United States — we used to call people who break the law public enemies."
Schiff appeared surprised and tried to press further. Ashcroft doubled down: "The President of the United States is the executive branch of the United States with whose charge it is to enforce the laws of the United States. When the President of the United States asks that the laws be enforced, I don't see that as consistent with his duties or responsibilities."
The clash with Schiff wasn't the only pushback. Sen. Peter Welch, a Vermont Democrat, tried to draw Ashcroft into commenting on the Anti-Weaponization Fund, a now-defunct fund meant to provide restitution to victims of Justice Department weaponization under the Biden administration.
Welch painted a hypothetical involving a president who paid an attorney $9 million before his nomination, then proposed suing the federal government for $10 billion and settling with a $1.7 billion fund the president would control.
Ashcroft declined the bait. "I didn't have that situation. I didn't have a president that had been the subject of illegal disclosure of his activities — criminal disclosure."
When Welch tried to interrupt, Ashcroft shot back: "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth that's — that's a big challenge in an oath, and so I want to give my answer and not your answer."
Schiff's own Senate press release published the full transcript confirming Ashcroft's remarks, and CBS News reported the exchange. The Federalist's framing that Ashcroft "ripped apart" a Democratic narrative is conservative commentary; the core of his verbatim remarks is that the DOJ has a duty to prosecute the president's enemies if they broke the law — and that political affiliation is not the determining factor.
The hearing is the latest flashpoint in the fight over Blanche's nomination to lead a Justice Department that, as some accounts on X noted, prosecuted a former president and raided his home before the weaponization label was applied to the current nominee.