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Here is the worst First Amendment take from Trump's former lawyer [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-17
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, one of President Donald Trump’s many personal attorneys who was rewarded with a high-level government position, proved on Tuesday exactly how unqualified he is.
Not content to let Attorney General Pam Bondi beclown herself on Monday by displaying the world’s worst understanding of free speech, Blanche decided to join in the buffoonery by whining about how it’s unfair and illegal to be mean to Trump.
You’d think that Blanche would have kept his mouth shut after Justice Sonia Sotomayor threw some subtle—yet cutting—shade at his boss.
President Donald Trump with his then-criminal defense attorney Todd Blanche during his trial at Manhattan criminal court in 2024.
“Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself that law school failed,” she said.
“Lawyer-trained representative” is so good. Imagine being the attorney general, certain that you’re the brightest thing going, and then a Supreme Court justice won’t even refer to you as an actual lawyer.
Blanche went on CNN to try to clean up this mess, confirming that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment—and claiming that Republicans are the real victims here.
“The Republican Party and this administration believes in that more than most, having been subjected to what we’ve been subjected to for the last several years,” he said.
Pretending that the right is the most oppressed is a bit much, but otherwise this is tolerable—until Blanche explained his unique understanding of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and how it should be used to prosecute people, because how dare they show up “where the president is trying to enjoy dinner and accost him with vile words?”
RICO was originally intended to be applied to mob prosecutions, allowing prosecutors to charge everyone in a corrupt organization, even if the people at the top are only issuing orders while the more lowly members of the organization commit the actual crimes.
Related | Even Charlie Kirk would've disagreed with Pam Bondi about 'hate speech'
Even setting aside the notion that there’s some shadowy figure coordinating people to yell at Trump, RICO wouldn’t apply here. A racketeering charge requires a predicate act—an underlying crime that forms a part of the overall criminal enterprise. But what counts as a predicate act is limited by law, which is a thing both Bondi and Blanche could learn about from government resources like this primer from the U.S. Sentencing Commission or the DOJ’s own manual.
Things like arson, drug trafficking, and murder count as predicate acts, which is not surprising since those are actual crimes. But you know what is not a crime? Yelling at the president.
Attorney General Pam Bondi
As always, Blanche is letting Trump run the show with this idiot idea he floated on Monday. Trump knows better, but Blanche certainly knows better. There’s pretty much no First Amendment right more sacred than the right to yell at the government. It’s pretty much baked into our national identity.
Besides being absolutely wrong on the law, Blanche also showed what incredibly thin-skinned babies these people are, rather than the tough macho free speech warriors they pretend to be. So when CNN’s Kaitlin Collins noted that Trump’s dinnertime protesters were just “shouting basically in his vicinity,” Blanche went into full “you rube, you idiot,” mode.
“So you're asking whether there's damage done by four individuals screaming and yelling at the president of our United States while he's trying to have dinner? That can't be a serious question,” Blanche responded.
Well, it isn’t a serious question in that Todd Blanche is not a serious person. The president is just not in any way damaged by people yelling at him during dinner. If that’s such a scary prospect to Trump and Blanche, the president can stay home and dine in the comfort of the White House.
Blanche and Bondi are what you get when you stuff the government with cronies and true believers: a partisan mess run by unqualified people. And in the end, all of these people want the right to be able to engage in speech—no matter how violent—and the left to have no voice at all.
Conservatives have always believed in “free speech for me, but not for thee”—but never in quite such stark terms.
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