Blanche rises, Noem falls, China exploits birthright chaos

Todd Blanche gets a boost

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has the inside track on getting the full-time job after the ouster of Pam Bondi, insiders tell Seen, Heard & Whispered.

“I love working for President Trump. It’s the greatest honor of a lifetime. And if President Trump chooses to keep me as acting, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate me, that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and I go back to being the [deputy attorney general], that’s an honor. If he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ’Thank you very much, I love you, sir,’” Mr. Blanche told reporters in his first press conference as acting attorney general this week.

Ms. Bondi was a Trump loyalist, but Mr. Blanche may top her in terms of devotion to the president.

He served on Mr. Trump’s defense team in between presidencies and won the deputy post last year, clearing the Senate on a 52-46 vote.

Mr. Blanche this week defended the president’s right to direct the Justice Department to pursue certain cases and said the DOJ had to purge itself of the prosecutors who pursued Mr. Trump in two criminal cases during the Biden administration.

Mr. Blanche said those lawyers had a conflict of ethics in working for someone they sought to put in prison.

“What happened the last four years is something that will never happen again,” he said.

China is weaponizing birthright citizenship

Sen. Rick Scott says China has found a way to “weaponize” America’s birthright citizenship policy by arranging to have babies born here — earning automatic citizenship — then raised abroad, without American values.

Usually that involves birth tourism, where a woman will come on a legal short-term visa to deliver a baby, who is then a citizen by dint of the birthright policy.

In its more extreme form, Chinese families are paying American women to be surrogate mothers.

“Communist China is our adversary; it’s high time we actually acted like it and stopped letting them weaponize our immigration laws against us — regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on the birthright question,” Mr. Scott, Florida Republican, told Seen, Heard & Whispered.

His Stopping Adversarial Foreign Exploitation of Kids in Domestic Surrogacy (SAFE KIDS) Act would create criminal penalties for third parties who facilitate surrogate contracts with people from foreign countries of concern.

The legislation cites a report from The Wall Street Journal out of Arcadia, California, that uncovered a Chinese couple contracting with multiple American women to be surrogates to their children.

When authorities showed up at the residence, they found more than 15 3-year-old children with shaved heads being cared for by nannies. 

President Trump has tried to rein in birthright citizenship, though it’s not clear how his executive order would affect surrogacy pregnancies where the egg and sperm are from a nonresident mother and father, but the “gestational carrier” is an American citizen on U.S. soil.

His order is also facing legal hurdles, with the Supreme Court sounding a skeptical note during oral argument over the policy earlier this month.

Mr. Scott said Chinese surrogacy is a matter of national security concern. He pointed to federal charges brought against a brother and sister accused of placing an explosive device at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida. Both suspects are children of illegal immigrants from China, according to Homeland Security.

“This is a clear national security threat. Thank God these two were caught before it was too late, but it is high time to confront the problem of Chinese birth tourism and act quickly so this never happens again,” Mr. Scott said.

“My SAFE KIDS Act puts a stop to communist China and other foreign adversaries’ efforts to abuse the system and harm children, women and our national security. It’s a human rights and national security threat if we don’t get this done,” he said.

Who goes with Noem?

Kristi Noem’s departure from Homeland Security drew sighs of relief from many inside the department, who are now sharing stories of chaos and mismanagement while she was at the helm.

But there’s also a growing worry over job security, as employees wonder just how broad a housecleaning new Secretary Markwayne Mullin will try.

Those in the top ranks of the department report feeling frozen in place, unsure whether they’ll be seen as one of Ms. Noem’s people, which could make them targets.

“The vibe I’m getting is that any relief over the regime change is overshadowed by everyone’s big [question] about whether or not they keep their jobs,” one source told Seen, Heard & Whispered. “That’s to be expected with a secretarial change.”

Mr. Trump booted Ms. Noem early last month, days after she struggled to defend the president and his agenda in hearings on Capitol Hill.

The president was particularly miffed that Ms. Noem said he had foreknowledge of her plan to spend more than $200 million in taxpayer money on ads encouraging illegal immigrants to self-deport — and putting herself front and center in the ads. Contracts for the ads also reportedly went to those with ties to her operation.

Congressional Democrats have suggested Ms. Noem lied in her testimony to Congress about the contracts. They referred the matter to the Justice Department for a perjury investigation.