Sheldon Whitehouse

Mr. President, reserving the right to object, I have to start by noting that President Trump and his cronies are using the White House to commit political fraud and corruption on an epic scale. This is unprecedented levels of corruption. The rot runs deep.

And to allow for that massive Trump corruption, the administration dismantled the ordinary mechanisms of government that deter, investigate, and punish that kind of activity.

We should be embarrassed at an administration that has deliberately destroyed the mechanisms of government that investigate and police corruption. The DOJ historically had all sorts of different components that worked to investigate and prosecute fraud: the Public Integrity Section; the Consumer Protection Branch; the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team; the Tax Division; the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces, known OCDETF. All have been gutted or side- lined under this corrupt administration. If there is something we should be embarrassed about, it is the destruction of those mechanisms.

Along with that, in his first month, the President dismissed 19 inspectors general, the actual people whose job it is to root out fraud and corruption in government.

It is clear that fighting fraud is not this administration's priority. What is, is weaponizing the Justice Department to use as a tool to go after President Trump's political enemies, and this new component is the perfect vehicle for more of that.

The Division's current head, just to give you an idea, is the former cochair of the so-called Weaponization Working Group, which is the semicovert array of Trump operatives put into government across various different organizations to go after and punish his political enemies and to propagate the lie that somehow he actually won the election against Joe Biden.

We have asked, on the Senate Judiciary Committee, questions about what this Division--how is this going to work? What is its structure? What is its operation? No answer.

So this whole thing is clouded in mystery, tainted by the Weaponization Working Group, and completely at odds with destruction of all the organizations within the Department of Justice, the components that actually did this work and whose destruction our Republican friends had absolutely no complaint about as they were being torn apart.

Now, there is one that I will focus on: the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force. When I was a U.S. attorney, I had an OCDETF group, and we worked in a very important way. OCDETF was who had brought Federal, State, and local law enforcement together to focus on organized crime, drug trafficking, and major fraud operations. It targeted major players. It had a financial crime component. Fraud was a piece of it, and the cartels and other big crime networks were its target.

President Reagan established OCDETF. What is not to like about it? It is very successful. It had a winning track record. Well, OCDETF got eliminated entirely by the Trump administration.

So I have a bill that would actually do something more meaningful about fraud, that would take a proven mechanism that worked for 40 years targeting cartels, big organized criminal investigations, huge fraudsters, RICO characters, and simply restore it to the way it was. It was working perfectly well.

Mr. President, so I, therefore, ask that the distinguished Senator's consent be modified and, instead, the Committee on the Judiciary be discharged from further consideration of S. 4004 and the Senate proceed its immediate consideration; and I further ask that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Yes, there is, Mr. President. I object.

Mr. President, I am here with another unanimous consent request, and I appreciate the Senator from Florida, Senator Scott, for being here to participate in this exchange.

I keep coming here to try to reinforce the obvious, scientifically clear point that climate change is real, that that is a simple scientific fact.

The way this has gone is that I came to the floor earlier this year and asked my colleagues to agree on that simple scientific fact: Climate change is real and, frankly, our fossil fuel emissions are causing it.

Well, I guess it is no surprise, but my Republican colleagues would not agree to that fact. So I have returned to the floor, time and again, in hopes that my Republican colleagues could agree to some of the simpler truths contained within that truth. Each time faced with well-documented truths about sea level rise or wide-ranging climate economic fallout, Republicans have objected.

Well, climate change isn't stopping or slowing down, and I won't either. So today's simple truth is that climate change is making wildfires more frequent, more intense, and more destructive. My question is, can we not all agree on that?

Here is some background. This chart from the National Interagency Fire Center shows that average U.S. acreage burned annually by wildfires has almost tripled in the last three decades, and the upward drift of the chart is pretty obvious.

The science proving that climate change makes wildfires worse is both clear and straightforward, and it has been well-known for decades. It is not new.

In fact, wildfires are part of a climate upheaval that Big Oil itself predicted. Shell, for instance, in a 1989 confidential planning document, warned that if fossil fuels were not brought under control, ``there would be more violent weather--more storms, more droughts, more deluges. Mean sea level would rise at least 30 cm. Agricultural patterns would be most dramatically

changed. . . . Boundaries would count for little--overwhelmed by the numbers. Conflicts would abound. Civilization could prove a fragile thing.''

That is what Big Oil said about climate change effects from their product back in 1989: ``Civilization could prove a fragile thing.''

This is the underlying temperature increase that is driving the droughts that Shell predicted nearly 40 years ago. So, first, we know that fossil fuel emissions--climate change--is increasing global temperatures. You can't read it. This goes back to 1860. This is a pretty longtime chart in this instance. This is now.

So how does it work? What does that heat do to drive wildfires? Well, warmer air draws more moisture out of the soil, out of plants, out of bodies of water. There is a scientific name for this. NOAA calls the phenomenon evaporative demand or sometimes atmospheric thirst.

But you don't have to use scientific language to understand it. You just watch a puddle dry up on a hot day. That is what you are seeing. NASA, NOAA, and the Forest Service call drought conditions like these fire weather--fire weather.

According to NASA's website on wildfires and climate change, ``human- caused climate change [is] the main cause for increasing fire weather in the American West.''

Now, it is about a quarter of 6 this evening when I read that quote from NASA's website. You might want to start the shot clock on how long it takes for the fossil fuel goons to get in there and change the website.

Climate change makes droughts last longer. The Forest Service reports that what was once a 4-month fire season now lasts 6 to 8 months. So there are more opportunities for any spark to start a dangerous blaze.

And climate changes make drought conditions worse; that is, drier; that is, with more flammable material. So those fires that do start in that longer season are more likely to become severe.

In January of 2025, a collection of wildfires in the Los Angeles metro area burned through over 15,000 homes and businesses, killed more than two dozen people, and poisoned the air with toxic pollution.

Mr. President, 2026 is already on track for one of the worst wildfire seasons on record. August wildfires in Spokane, WA, caused over $1 billion in damage and destroyed over 800 people's homes. In July, wildfire smoke blanketed much of the country and degraded air quality for tens of millions of people.

Researchers have found that the number of people in the United States who experience at least one extreme smoke day per year is up 27 times in the last decade. So if you used to have one extreme smoke day in your life, now you have 27 in the same period of time.

Every county in the continental United States experiences degraded air quality from wildfire smoke at least 16 times every year, and the cost of that is real. Air pollution from wildfire smoke makes people sicker and causes deaths.

Scientists have known for decades--decades--that climate change is making wildfires worse. More recently, the data has gotten more precise. We can now connect climate change to specific individual events.

In the case of the L.A. fires, scientists from the World Weather Attribution and Imperial College London found that climate change made the weather conditions that drove these fires 35 percent more likely.

This kind of analysis is called climate attribution. The National Academies recently released a comprehensive report on the current capabilities of climate attribution, including on wildfires. To no one's surprise, the fossil fuel industry and its allies are already out to discredit this work.

In the face of tens of thousands of Americans losing their homes to wildfires, millions more facing skyrocketing insurance premiums as wildfire risk becomes either unavailable or unaffordable, and the risk of crashing home values--because when you can't insure your home, guess what. You can't get a mortgage on your home.

And if you are the kind of person who bought your home with a mortgage and needs somebody with a mortgage to buy it from you when it is time to sell, that crashes the value of your home. It destroys its worth.

Well, in the face of those facts, the traditional response of the fossil fuel industry is to try and hide the truth, but there is truth, and the truth is climate change is making wildfires more frequent, more intense, and more destructive. And I really hope that we are able to agree on that.

Mr. President, so notwithstanding rule XXII, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs be discharged and the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of S. Res. 559; further, that the resolution be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I am looking forward to the day when the Senator from Florida and I can be working together on these issues.

As he knows very well, the University of Florida teaches the science of climate change. They have courses like Managing for a Changing Climate, Climate Change and Health, Climate Change Science and Solutions, Oceans and Global Climate Change, and many, many others.

And it would be great if the science that the University of Florida teaches were also respected and reflected here on the Senate floor. It is more than just the University of Florida getting it right.

This also lands in Florida in big ways because while wildfire may not be an issue in the good Senator's State, flooding sure is. And that same cascade of risk that I talked about--starting with climate risk, hitting insurance security, moving into mortgage availability, clobbering property values, and then leading to recession--is well underway in Florida.

Some have called it the great climate insurance collapse, and in that very difficult situation, Florida is first and worst into that danger. Climate risk first; insurance collapse, second; mortgage market suffering, third--all of those things are happening.

Indeed, the chief economist from Freddie Mac, who is not a green guy--he is a finance and mortgage guy--warned there was a coastal property values crash coming.

And as we go through those different stages from climate risk to insurance to mortgages to property values, unfortunately, Florida led the country last year in lost property values, which is at least, in part, I think a function of this risk and how it is hammering Florida homeowners.

So you don't really get away from this kind of a general risk. The insurance industry is not lying to everybody. They are not leaving customers who pay their premiums because they don't like the customer. They are leaving customers who pay their premiums because the property is no longer insurable.

And what we are seeing here across the United States is massive predictions in insurance rate increase, and Florida is really at the epicenter of that. This dark band is a 200-percent to 300-percent increase, and you see it all along the Florida coast. They are running at about $14,000 already in insurance costs for homes in Florida. Double that--not double it, add 200 percent and add 300 percent. That is actually tripling and quadrupling. You can see how that begins to hammer the home's value.

And here, you see a similar problem. This isn't just a cost problem; this is a nonrenewal problem. It is going to end up costing you more money once you are nonrenewed--absolutely. But you also have to go through the immediate hassle and worry and anxiety of finding out how the heck you are going to insure your home once your insurance company has nonrenewed you.

And you can see the focus of nonrenewal is along these coastal areas, very heavily in Florida, and then in some of these wildfire areas that we talked about out in California.

So this continues to come at us. It is focused on certain geographic areas more than others, but no place more than Florida.

So I look forward to working with the good Senator from Florida on finding solutions before the bottom falls out of his insurance, mortgage, and real estate markets.

I yield the floor.

Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. President, I am here today to join the chorus of opposition to Todd Blanche's nomination as Attorney General of the United States.

Things that Republicans have purported to care about are disastrous with this guy. Pam Bondi put the blame directly on Todd Blanche for the Department of Justice's foulup with the Epstein files.

That foulup was pretty deadly serious for the women who were victims, who had managed to keep that fact private until Todd Blanche and the DOJ fouled that up and put out their names, put out their addresses, put out their photographs, and in some cases put out photographs with very little clothing on--complete disruption of the lives of the victims of Epstein's depravity, complete incompetence from a document- production point of view.

And on the other side, this guy actually participated in the Epstein coverup. Remember that there was a witness who spoke to FBI agents about having been assaulted by Donald Trump when she was about 14 years old, physically assaulted and sexually assaulted.

She spoke to the FBI at least four times. Those four times were recorded in FBI 302s. A 302 is the FBI name for the witness statement that the agents write up after an interview.

So four times this woman has been interviewed about what had happened to her as a girl. Three of those 302s specifically mentioned Donald Trump. In the disclosure that Todd Blanche made under the Epstein files law, the only one of the four that got disclosed was the one that didn't mention Donald Trump.

That ought to be disqualifying right there. Luckily, some very sharp investigators realized through, like, gaps in Bates stamp numbers that documents were missing and that the three 302s had not been disclosed. And so Blanche was forced to cough those up.

But behind a 302 come the agent notes. And there are still 37 pages of documents relating to that that are still suppressed, that are still covered up, that look to be the agents' notes, which should have been disclosed. So the coverup continued with respect to allegations against Donald Trump. Where else did the coverup continue?

Well, the Treasury Department sent to the Department of Justice what are called suspicious activity reports. A suspicious activity report is what you get when international banking transactions look like something funny is afoot, look like there is, for instance, money laundering going on. In this case, it was money laundering and human- trafficking concerns that provoked the suspicious activity reports.

You don't have to be a genius investigator to look at a suspicious activity report and deduce it might have something to do with some suspicious activity. It is the title of the report, for Pete's sake.

Billions of dollars of transactions were behind those suspicious activity reports. How many were investigated by the Blanche Department of Justice? Zero. Turned a complete blind eye to that whole aspect of the Epstein files, even though the suspicious activity reports were right in front of them.

And then he goes running down to Tallahassee to interview Epstein's comrade-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell. Did he use that interview to develop any new information, to go after people who were culpable in the Epstein files? No.

He used that interview to extract exculpatory comments from her about Donald Trump. Oh, that he was a perfect gentleman. And the next thing you know, she is rewarded with a transfer to a Club Fed-type prison.

What is the excuse for that? Oh, she was at risk. We felt she was in danger. Well, look, I have been around law enforcement for a long time, and this is the first time I have ever seen a prisoner allegedly in danger be transferred to a less secure setting to solve the problem of danger. Right? You move the prisoner to a more secure setting, not a less secure setting. It makes no sense. So in the Epstein files, Todd Blanche's fingerprints are all over the screwup and the coverup. Then we move on to the slush fund and the Trump family tax fraud amnesty, which was cooked up in a deal surrounding a Federal court proceeding, which was such a mess that the judge in that Federal court proceeding has gone back to look at what the heck happened.

She was looking at whether something happened called fraud upon the court. You probably haven't heard of fraud upon the court. It is unusually rare. It is a thermonuclear ethics accusation. We have looked. In the history of the Department of Justice, fraud on the court has not even been alleged against any senior DOJ official--ever. Ever.

And here you have a court that opened a proceeding, an inquiry, into whether or not there was fraud on the court, and that is still pending.

There is still every reason to believe that Blanche may be found culpable for putting a fraud on the court together to cook up the slush fund tax amnesty scheme. That is pretty unheard of.

Unfortunately, it is not uncommon in this Blanche Department of Justice. There is a cascade of criticism from Federal courts about misconduct by this Department of Justice--misconduct that is unprecedented.

I will tell you that I was the U.S. attorney for the District of Rhode Island. If judges had used words like this about my attorneys' conduct in their courtrooms, there would have been consequences. At a minimum, there would have been staff meetings. There could have been referrals to the Office of Professional Responsibility. There could have been apologies required to the court. There could have been a reboot, internal office discipline of what is going on with this case. But when a judge says that the government's argument is disingenuous, when the judge says that the government's argument is a pretext for something else, when the judge says that the government has engaged in bad faith, each one of those is a four-alarm fire word.

In medicine, there are things that they call never events, things that should never happen in a hospital that you protect against, these are never event words coming from Federal judges. And yet they are commonplace in the corrupted Department of Justice run by Todd Blanche.

As to his complicity in the Epstein files coverup, I ask unanimous consent that a letter from Epstein survivors to Senators Tillis and Cornyn be printed in the Record at the end of my remarks.

With respect to the destruction of the Department of Justice that he has wrought, I would also ask that we add George Will's column called ``Against Todd Blanche.''

I ask unanimous consent that the article entitled ``Against Todd Blanche'' be printed in the Record.

And with respect to this litany of criticism of the honesty of the Blanche Department of Justice, I would like to add a ProPublica article entitled ``Federal Judges Chastise Trump's Justice Department for `Unlawful,' `Unethical' and `Unseemly' Conduct,'' whose first sentence begins:

Across the country, federal judges are calling out

Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented

ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold

centuries-old legal norms.

I ask unanimous consent that the article entitled ``Federal Judges Chastise Trump's Justice Department for `Unlawful,' `Unethical' and `Unseemly' Conduct'' be printed in the Record.

And then this isn't just a problem in American legal communities. There is a global magazine called The Economist magazine, which, by the way, does not run liberal. It is a fairly conservative publication.

The cover story in the July 18 The Economist is a picture of the Department of Justice logo and the title ``Degradation in progress.''

I ask that The Economist magazine article--there are actually two. One is the opening article that they lead with before they get to the main article; and the second is the main article--the two articles about the degradation of the Department of Justice under Todd Blanche be added to the Record as well.

I ask unanimous consent that the articles entitled ``Degradation in progress'' and ``The rule of one'' be printed in the Record.

Last, there is a group called Just Security, which keeps track of what goes on in Federal courts. This is a binder of the cases that they have put together in which a Federal judge is harshly criticizing the integrity or the competence of the Department of Justice.

This binder, frankly, should not exist. This is two-sided, by the way. These many cases--it is just astounding. I am not going to ask that this all be put into the Record. But I will note that if you look at justsecurity.org, you can look at their report published on March 19, 2026. It gets regularly updated.

And if you want to go through it, you can see truly appalling criticisms by Federal judges of every appointment background against incompetence and dishonesty by the Blanche Department of Justice.

Where that really hits the road is with something called the presumption of regularity. You might not know what the presumption of regularity is, but it is a benefit that the government enjoys--that as a matter of policy, the Federal judiciary has determined that the Federal Government is generally so honest and competent that its proceedings will be given the presumption of regularity that the benefit of the doubt will go to the Department of Justice lawyers and to the government Agencies involved.

Unless the adversary can prove otherwise, courts will presume that the government has done the right thing. And over and over again, we have seen judges say that presumption of regularity is now shot because there is so much dishonesty and incompetence coming out of the Department of Justice. That is unprecedented.

There are hundreds of other reasons to vote against this most reprehensible Attorney General nominee in American history, but the very specific ones about his complicity in the Epstein files screwup and coverup, his being the first senior Department of Justice official in the history of the United States to face a fraud on the courts inquiry, where the judge already decided that the proceeding was a sham and that the parties were in collusion with each other and that the whole thing was done in bad faith, and that that is not an isolated incident--that is part of a pattern of incompetence and dishonesty out of the Department of Justice that has never before happened in the United States of America.

If my Republican colleagues want to get behind that--if they are cool with an Attorney General who has that record--that is on you.

I yield the floor.