Washington DC: Attorney General Todd Blanche is briefing reporters from the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday, becoming the latest senior administration official to take questions from the press as the White House searches for a new press secretary.
Blanche’s appearance comes 11 days after Vice President Vance spoke to reporters in the White House briefing room—the first such briefing since July and the first since Leavitt’s departure.
Attorney General Todd Blanche said that he does not believe it is the Justice Department’s role to regulate artificial intelligence, calling the technology “extraordinarily beneficial to our society,” while accusing Democrats of raising concerns about AI in an effort to influence the midterm elections.
“As far as AI is concerned, we have a lot of — there’s a lot of criminal laws, and so if anybody associated with AI violates criminal law, we’ll investigate that, we already have,” Blanche told reporters during a White House Rose Garden press briefing. “There’s plenty of cases involving AI that we’ve charged individuals. I do not think it’s the job of the Department of Justice to regulate. We’re prosecutors, not regulators, so we’re not going to try to regulate AI.”
Blanche acknowledged that the debate around AI safety “conveniently has become a flashpoint this week,” after Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, called for a slowdown in the pace at which the technology advances in a lengthy essay shared on X.
“The way this has come around today, and not three months ago — I mean, I was watching the news today, every Democrat senator suddenly races to a microphone to talk about AI after being eerily silent for months and months and months,” he said. “So to talk about the timing of this as being nothing but an effort to influence the midterms, I shouldn’t have to say that out loud … and that shouldn’t be what drives the decisions that we’re making around AI.”
Blanche also announced that an indictment has been unsealed in the Southern District of New York charging multiple Russian citizens he said worked for the country’s intelligence community for allegedly financing terrorism and conspiring to commit murder plots around the world.
The indictment, Blanche said, includes alleged efforts by the group to murder a Russian dissident whom they believed was located in the Washington, D.C. area.
Blanche joined Vice President Vance in Missouri on Monday to announce the Trump administration has permanently suspended nearly 870,000 borrowers from future Small Business Administration (SBA) loans and other agency programs as part of its crackdown on suspected pandemic-era fraud.
Blanche also highlighted a new federal case against a 21-year-old Pennsylvania man accused of plotting an attack on behalf of ISIS.
The man, Jonathan Hunter Kramer, was arrested yesterday on allegations that he intended to use firearms and ammunitions to commit a crime on behalf of a terrorist organization.
According to court documents, Kramer, who was found responsible as a juvenile of planning a mass casualty event, offered to share explosive manuals with people online. He also allegedly expressed his intent to prepare for his “mission” and that he was just missing a “weapon,” according to prosecutors.
FBI agents surveilled Kramer as he allegedly purchased a disposable phone, met with an individual, and paid for a hotel room with cash.
When they later executed search warrants, agents allegedly found a semiautomatic rifle, five magazines, a rifle bipod and scope, a prayer rug, pepper spray and approximately 30 knives.
They also found a handwritten note stating “DoNt look For me. IDK what I did buT I cant live In constant Fear.”
On mail-in voting, Blanche said he did not believe Americans had closely followed the legal debate and downplayed concerns about confusion over voting options.
“I’m not sure that the American people followed this as closely as the folks in this beautiful Rose Garden do,” Blanche said today at a White House briefing when asked about voter confusion over their mail-in voting options.
“So no, I haven’t seen any suggestion or information or heard from secretary of state that that’s an issue,” he added.
Blanche claimed that “ballots are confusing in every election” but that state and local officials handle this issue “very well.”
Blanche also defended Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky brought articles of impeachment against him over allegations that Hegseth violated the War Powers Resolution by conducting a war against Iran without congressional authorization.
“Secretary Hegseth is doing a phenomenal job, and the secretary of war doesn’t just go off and do things. So, he follows the law. And so the DOJ plays a role in that, and we play an active role in making sure the laws are complied with,” Blanche said while holding a press briefing in the White House Rose Garden.
Blanche also pushed back on a reporter’s question characterizing the United States’ military action toward Iran as a war, despite several administration officials and the president having, at times, referred to the conflict as a war.
