For the past ten years I’ve been blessed to serve as a prosecutor in Northeast Mississippi. In this job you learn fast that accountability only means something if you’ll hold your own side to it. I once brought down a sheriff in my own party, and got him indicted. It wasn’t comfortable. But that’s the oath: you follow the evidence no matter who it touches, and you answer to the public — not to the powerful people who’d rather you look the other way.
That same principle is what the office of Attorney General is built on. The people’s lawyer serves the law and the American people, not the president personally. That line is the difference between a justice system and a weapon — and the Senate is preparing to erase it.
Todd Blanche was the president’s personal criminal defense lawyer. Now he’s about to become the people’s lawyer, and you can already see how he treats the job. As acting Attorney General, he’s running the Justice Department that still refuses to unseal all the Epstein files. He stood up a $1.8 billion fund to pay the president’s political allies and January 6 rioters — and only when he needed the votes to get confirmed did he hand two senators a piece of paper saying he’d drop it. He’s repeatedly used the Justice Department to protect the powerful. The senators lining up to confirm him aren’t confused about that. They’re choosing it.
Unsurprisingly, one of them is Mississippi’s junior senator: Cindy Hyde-Smith.
That should stop us cold, especially today as we mark the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act — the law Mississippians bled for. The Supreme Court already weakened it, most recently earlier this year with its Callais ruling. Now Washington wants to hand the department that’s supposed to enforce federal voting protections to a man whose loyalty runs to one person. An Attorney General who answers to the president, not the people, is the one who decides whether your right to vote is protected at all. If Todd Blanche gets confirmed, that’s “equal justice under law,” betrayed twice.
Like most Mississippians, my position on the Epstein files is simple: release them. Our justice system owes survivors the truth; it shouldn’t bury evidence to protect the most powerful. As a prosecutor, an American and a father of two young girls, it’s not a hard call.
It was for Cindy Hyde-Smith. When the Senate had the chance to force those files out into the open, she voted to keep them sealed — and now she’s about to vote to put the man most likely to keep them buried in charge of the whole department. That’s her whole pattern: betraying Mississippi by putting politics over people. To be clear, this is the same senator who cashes checks from fertilizer companies now under federal investigation for price-fixing while Mississippi farmers watch their costs soar, and who voted to put hundreds of thousands of Mississippians at risk of losing their health care to fund a tax break for people making over $600,000 a year. Given the choice between serving the powerful and the people who elected her, she never chooses us.
Given the choice between serving the powerful and the people who elected her, Cindy Hyde-Smith never chooses us.
She and others may argue a president should get his cabinet picks — fair enough. But the Attorney General isn’t the president’s lawyer. He’s all of ours — the one person who is supposed to be able to look at anyone, including the president, and follow the evidence wherever it goes. So this isn’t an abstract Washington issue. It’s about whether the law applies to everyone, or only to the people powerful enough to stay above it. And it’s about whether our junior senator will ever ask a hard question before she rubber-stamps what her political allies and donors want — or just keep hiding from the people she works for, six years running and not one town hall.
I’m a prosecutor, so I know what the job is. Whether you’re a district attorney, Attorney General or U.S. senator, the work is the same: follow the facts, do right by the people, and never forget the public you serve. Todd Blanche has forgotten who the Attorney General is for, and Cindy Hyde-Smith is about to help install him. She owes Mississippians an answer first: how does a senator who says she advocates for survivors vote to hand the whole Justice Department to the man still refusing to unseal all of the Epstein files? She hasn’t answered that – and she’s hoping she won’t have to.
Mississippi deserves better than a senator who protects the powerful and doesn’t answer to the people. We deserve one who will put Mississippi first and hold the powerful accountable — no matter what office they hold or what party they belong to.
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