“I said we ought to do this with one sentence,” Grassley recalled in an interview. 

But Grassley had a political mess on his hands and saw time slipping away for a deal. Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), one of the holdouts, had just canceled a meeting with Blanche slated for that morning, and negotiations were stalled at the staff level. A draft document hadn’t even been circulated going into the week of a make-or-break committee vote, according to two sources familiar with the talks.

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The shakiness of Blanche’s nomination would continue all the way to Saturday, when he was confirmed in the Senate by the narrowest of margins, with two GOP senators joining all Democrats in opposition. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), a longtime Trump skeptic, provided the decisive “yes” vote.

The bigger challenge for Blanche, however, was in the Judiciary Committee — and it fell to Grassley as chairman to break a stalemate that risked embarrassing President Donald Trump and denying him a high-profile Cabinet pick.

Grassley, who at 92 is the longest-serving member of the Senate, managed to nudge both sides toward a deal just in time for a postponed but successful committee vote on Tuesday. That vote then allowed Blanche’s nomination to proceed to the Senate floor before the August recess, a month-long break that many saw as fatal to Blanche’s prospects of being confirmed.

There were multiple dynamics outside of Grassley’s control that nearly derailed the confirmation.

Blanche was negotiating with two outgoing senators who had nothing to lose politically if they decided to vote “no.” Cornyn had been defeated by a Trump-backed challenger in his May primary for reelection, while Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) announced his retirement as part of a running series of spats with the president that picked up in earnest last year.

Two sources close to the negotiations blamed the delays on the president’s personal attorney, Boris Epshteyn, who was involved in discussions over Trump’s immunity from tax audits, another element of a May settlement that Cornyn was scrutinizing.

Blanche assured Cornyn at his confirmation hearing that there were limits to that immunity, but Cornyn again wanted that assurance in writing. Epshteyn did not respond to a request for comment at time of publication.

Blanche on the brink

Grassley’s July 27 phone call to Blanche was just the beginning of what became a week-long push to get his nomination back on track. He arranged a meeting with Cornyn and Tillis to see if they would vote to advance Blanche out of the Judiciary Committee and then hammer out the written document before a floor vote.

“It was kind of, could I get you guys to vote without having all this worked out?” Grassley said of the meeting.

When the two senators made clear they weren’t willing to do so, Grassley arranged a sitdown with them and Blanche last Thursday – effectively rebooting a meeting that Cornyn had repeatedly scheduled and then cancelled.

That meeting was held at the headquarters of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, a venue Tillis said he requested “so we could just get out of the limelight.”

Notably, Grassley said he sympathized with what Cornyn and Tillis were demanding and that they had “legitimate questions, legitimate concerns.” He also understood that other Republicans were just as interested in having a written agreement and might have voted “no” if Cornyn and Tillis couldn’t work out a solution.

“If these two hadn’t settled it,” he added, “there would have been problems on the floor.”

But Grassley’s chief concern was a setback that could prove fatal to Blanche’s nomination. He was already staring down a postponement of the committee markup, originally set for last Thursday.

One source with knowledge of the negotiations said that once Grassley cancelled the markup, he faced pressure from the administration to reschedule it whether he had Cornyn’s support or not.

In the interview, Grassley said he never contemplated a failed committee vote.

“It wouldn’t have been any good to have a meeting without the votes,” Grassley said. “You either vote him out with approval or vote him out without recommendation — you still got to have 12 Republican votes.”

“So, anybody that was proposing that you could vote him out without having a majority vote didn’t know how the Senate operates,” he added. “So, I straightened that out with them.”

Grassley buys more time

Grassley admitted he had “no level of confidence” that Blanche’s nomination would succeed when he made the snap decision last Friday to put a committee meeting back on the books.

He’d spent the evening making calls from his Iowa farm to figure out a course of action, and though he planned to cancel again by Monday if no deal materialized, Grassley saw a rescheduled markup as a play for more time.

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Trump was beginning to grow frustrated with the delay and lashed out at Cornyn and Tillis on social media, at one point threatening to keep Blanche on as acting attorney general indefinitely.

But Blanche had been trading language with Cornyn throughout the week, and Grassley wanted to leave open the possibility of a floor vote.

Grassley made the decision after multiple Friday night phone calls with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, an old Senate colleague who reached out on behalf of Trump.

The senator called them “very friendly” conversations. A source said the calls were to talk through “avenues” for getting Blanche through the Judiciary Committee.

Weekend breakthrough

It wouldn’t be long before the agreement with Cornyn came together, but one source close to the negotiations said the talks were at risk of falling apart by last Thursday. Tillis said the “operative words that got us to a ‘yes’ happened over the weekend.”

“It was really language that Cornyn insisted on,” he said, referring to the $1.776 billion payout fund. “That was admittedly a compromise, and one that makes me feel comfortable – that clearly the 1776 fund has been rescinded.”

The language was released in a brief letter by the Justice Department on Sunday shortly before midnight, but had been approved earlier that night, according to one source.

Cornyn said that the core negotiating group was Blanche, Tillis, and himself, but that Grassley was the “big kahuna” as committee chairman and stayed in “close touch.”

“I think he likes to keep the trains running and keep them on time, and so he was not real happy that we had to pass on the first markup that he scheduled, but all’s well that is well,” Cornyn said.

Mike Davis, a former Grassley staffer and outside adviser to the White House, also became involved after the first markup was scrapped, offering to help work with Cornyn’s counsel and the Justice Department on compromise language. Davis declined to comment for this story.

Throughout the process, Grassley took a gentler approach than Trump, relaying to Cornyn and Tillis at their meeting, “We’re going to be friends either way, but I want to confirm Blanche.”

The breakthrough led to a successful committee vote on Tuesday, with Cornyn and Tillis voting for Blanche with the rest of the GOP Judiciary members.

“He’s always been supportive,” said Tillis. “Anytime I’ve had some of these situations — had a few others in the past — Chuck Grassley, he’s always just been a good, solid chair, and he takes care of his members.”

In terms of the White House, one source said Trump “stayed out of it for the most part” but that his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, got “heavily” involved over the weekend. A second source confirmed Wiles’s involvement.

Clinching 50 votes

With a successful committee vote behind him, Blanche turned his attention to winning over the remaining holdouts who were not Judiciary members before his nomination reached the floor.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) announced she was a “no” the same day as the markup, but Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) came out as a “yes,” and there was still a path if Blanche could convince either Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) or Cassidy, two skeptical but persuadable GOP senators.

Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who is recovering from a fall he suffered in June, appeared to hurt the whip count with his absence, although he’s an outspoken critic of the “anti-weaponization” fund, and it’s not clear he would have supported Blanche.

The final breakthrough came from a series of conversations Blanche had with Cassidy, another retiring senator who announced his support from the Senate floor on Friday morning.

In a Wednesday meeting, Cassidy fixated on the Justice Department’s investigation into Cassidy Hutchinston, the one-time star witness to the Jan. 6 committee, according to a source familiar with the discussion.

Cassidy had expressed concern that the investigation was politicized, but argued in his Friday floor speech that Blanche was better than other nominees Trump might have chosen and that a conversation he had with former Attorney General Bill Barr was persuasive as well.

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He also echoed the advice Cornyn had for Cassidy after the committee vote. Cornyn, who ultimately encouraged the other holdouts to support Blanche, argued that the Justice Department needed a Senate-confirmed leader to avoid additional “chaos and dysfunction.”

Blanche lost the vote of Murkowski but skated through 50-49 with Cassidy’s support.