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Rachel Maddow Predicts Top Trump Goon Target After Hegseth

The MS NOW star has one guess about who’s on deck for impeachment.

Pete Hegseth’s impeachment is only the beginning, Rachel Maddow predicts.

The Secretary of War, 46, faces a House impeachment vote this week, an initiative led by outgoing Republican congressman Thomas Massie. Massie’s articles of impeachment accuse Hegseth of high crimes and misdemeanors, listing eight specific charges against him, including illegally waging war in Iran and Yemen, and illegally capturing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

Maddow, 53, predicted on The Daily Show that after Hegseth’s impeachment process, the newly Democratic Congress will turn its attention to Attorney General Todd Blanche, 52.

“I think they can impeach not only Pete Hegseth, but Todd Blanche at the Department of Justice,” Maddow told Daily Show host Jon Stewart. “And I think that’s important, not just to shame those guys. But in some cases, it’s essentially to stop a crime wave in progress. Just let them know they can’t get away with this stuff anymore, and impeach them.”

Blanche was President Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney before he became Deputy Attorney General in March 2025. In August, he became Attorney General after Trump dismissed Pam Bondi in April.

Blanche has faced accusations of abusing the Department of Justice’s prosecutorial powers and compromising its independence to support Trump.

Maddow discussed how Blanche’s actions have turned the Justice Department into MAGA’s political tool instead of an impartial institution. In June, a judge found that Blanche “conceded” to violating laws related to the release of the Epstein files.

Maddow cited Blanche’s closed-door meeting with Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell as evidence of the DOJ’s corruption; Maxwell moved from a low-security prison to a minimum-security prison shortly after.

“He sits down with Ghislaine Maxwell, has this long conversation with her in which he asks her questions about how she feels about the president,” Maddow said. “‘Did you ever encounter the president? He didn’t do anything bad, did he?’ And she tells him, ‘Oh, no, the president is not only super innocent; he’s also lovely and handsome.’ She just spouts this totally factually uncorroborated, pseudoexonerating nonsense about the president.”

“What happens immediately after?” Maddow continued. “She mysteriously gets moved to a minimum security facility where, among other things, she gets a puppy. They don’t usually let sex offenders train puppies, but she got one.”

Maddow added that “the category of her offense does not qualify her to be in that sort of prison,” but “it happened right after Todd Blanche talked to her about Trump. And they said, ‘Oh, the Bureau of Prisons just did this on their own. We have no idea. It’s unconnected.’ And that alone is kind of impeachment-level stuff.”

Maddow said that Blanche’s list of offenses goes beyond allegedly using his DOJ powers to support the child sex trafficker. ICE shot and killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti under Bondi’s leadership, when Blanche was Deputy Attorney General. He refused to investigate the killings.

Additionally, she said Blanche neglected to investigate claims from Calley Means, a senior official from the Department of Health and Human Services who resigned in October. Means said he left because of Trump’s corrupt former White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles, who prioritized special interest groups that paid her lobbyist daughter Katie. Means also said on Joe Rogan’s podcast that Wiles blocked a Make America Healthy Again initiative due to concern that the administration would lose political contributions from the sugar industry.

Blanche has said the DOJ will not investigate Wiles.

“She was taking money, was essentially demanding that you pay her family if you wanted to get Trump administration attention and action,” Maddow said. “That’s a really serious claim to make. A Justice Department that had a public integrity division would investigate that.”

“Todd Blanche says, ‘I’m the president’s lawyer, and I’m not going to investigate that,’” she added. “Well, Todd Blanche should therefore be investigated for that refusal to investigate obvious corruption. It’s happened to previous attorneys general.”

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Dana Herrnstadt Editorial Intern, Obsessed

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