Todd Blanche confirmation hearing turns to Smith bombshells: ‘Did Jack Smith read my emails?’

John Kennedy asking Todd Blanche point blank whether Jack Smith read his emails is the kind of question that shouldn't need to be asked in a functioning republic. Forty-four members of Congress had their texts swept up in a special counsel investigation aimed at one man, Donald Trump. That's not a rounding error. That's a dragnet.

The instinct from Smith's defenders will be the usual one: this was all legally authorized, metadata happens, nothing to see here. Maybe some of that is true in the narrow technical sense. But the scale here is the story. When a federal investigation into a single defendant somehow reaches into the communications of nearly four dozen sitting lawmakers, the burden shifts. It's on Smith's team and on DOJ to explain exactly why that net had to be that wide, not on the rest of us to assume good faith because a badge was involved.

Blanche is now in the position of having to answer for an apparatus he didn't build but is about to inherit. That's actually useful, because it forces the question into the open at a confirmation hearing instead of a footnote in a court filing nobody reads. Congress asking "did you read my mail" of the Justice Department is not a normal sentence, and it shouldn't become one just because the target this time was politically convenient.

If this had happened to a Democratic administration investigating a Republican president, the outrage machine would already be at full volume. The standard has to be the same regardless of whose texts got swept up. Blanche's confirmation is a decent moment to start insisting on that.