WASHINGTON — Todd Blanche, the personal criminal defense attorney for Captain Comb-Over, cleared a procedural hurdle in his nomination for attorney general Monday after a tense meeting with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. The session had been requested by Republican Senator Tom Tillis of North Carolina as a condition for his confirmation vote. Within hours of the meeting ending, Tillis declared it a success.
Survivors described a very different interaction. Liz Stein, an Epstein survivor who attended, said Blanche crossed his arms, looked at his watch, and treated the encounter as a task to be endured. “It had absolutely nothing to do with us and everything to do with [Blanche] checking a box so that he can get a promotion,” Stein told reporters. She said the nominee gave no transparent answers about outstanding investigative leads, offered no promises, and told the group he would be open to meeting again only after they went to the FBI.
Stein noted that survivors have been going to the FBI for 30 years. The agency’s unresponsiveness is a central reason they sought the meeting in the first place. Another survivor said the session left them feeling demoralized and hollowed out.
Tillis did not dispute those accounts. Instead, he framed Blanche’s attendance as the point of the exercise. “I commend Todd Blanche for doing what all of his predecessors over the last two decades never did,” Tillis said. “Meet the victims of Jeffrey Epstein’s horrific crimes.” The senator praised Blanche’s “willingness to directly engage and listen to them.”
The gap between the senator’s summation and the survivors’ testimony is not a bug. It is the quiet operating logic of a confirmation process that has recently adopted a simplified standard for nominee outreach, internally referred to by committee staff as the “But Did You Meet?” test. Under the framework, a meeting’s success is measured by start time and headcount, not by the emotional state of participants upon exit. A committee aide, speaking on background, explained that the metric was designed to “avoid subjective evaluations of interpersonal warmth.”
A spokesperson for Blanche’s transition team characterized the meeting as productive. “Mr. Blanche met with the survivors. He listened. He has kept the door open for further engagement once standard protocols have been exhausted,” the spokesperson said, adding that the nominee had fulfilled every item on the senator’s request checklist.
Tillis later confirmed he had heard the survivors’ concerns but remained satisfied that Blanche had not cancelled or rescheduled the appointment. Blanche’s confirmation hearing is set for next Thursday. The survivors have been invited to submit written testimony, which will be entered into the official record and placed in a binder the committee does not plan to open.
