Attorney General Todd Blanche defended President Donald Trump‘s criticism of the conservative Supreme Court justices who decided against the administration’s efforts to restrict mail-in ballots before this November’s midterm elections.
During a White House press briefing in the Rose Garden, Blanche contended that Trump has “every right, and indeed he should communicate his concerns with the Supreme Court whenever he has them.”
“As far as President Trump’s Truth about the justices, he is very frustrated,” Blanche told reporters on Tuesday. “This isn’t the first time that he’s done it, and it won’t be the last. He’s also publicly very appreciative of the Supreme Court when there’s decisions that he very much agrees with. That’s what a democracy is about.”
Earlier Tuesday in a lengthy Truth Social post, Trump described Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, and Brett Kavanaugh, justices he nominated during his first administration, as “not the people I interviewed” and “a shell of their original selves.”
Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, pushed back when asked whether he would encourage a client to engage with the justices in the president’s manner.
“You can’t talk about my background and then ask me what I would have done,” the attorney general said. “He’s the president of the United States. So the real question is whether the president of the United States is allowed to be critical of another branch of government, and the answer to that is absolutely, of course he is.”
He added: “What I would have advised the client, what I would have done when I was a prosecutor, or when I was President Trump’s lawyer isn’t in any way or shape relevant to what the president of the United States should be doing in communicating to the American people.”
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The Supreme Court ruled in an emergency order on Monday that the U.S. Postal Service cannot adopt a government regulation restricting the use of mail-in ballots that would have required states to provide the Postal Service with voter-specific data and depend on agency-approved mail-ballot envelopes that could be tracked with barcodes, with the Postal Service empowered not to send out ballots that do not comply and people not on the lists.