Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche made an almost interesting concession during his Senate testimony on Tuesday.

Under questioning from Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., President Donald Trump’s defense lawyer-turned-top Justice Department official said he would commit to not recommending a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Yes, I can commit to that, of course,” Blanche said of agreeing to not help the convicted child sex trafficker and associate of Jeffrey Epstein’s. In 2019, Epstein died in custody ahead of a federal trial on his own sex trafficking charges.

Fallout from Epstein’s sprawling connections, including his association with Trump (who has denied any wrongdoing), has haunted the president’s second term, as his administration has struggled to prove that it’s taking the Epstein matter seriously.

It should be unremarkable that the (acting) head of the DOJ would agree not to recommend a pardon to someone who has done nothing obvious to deserve one. But the fact that Van Hollen thought to pose the question emphasized that we’re in remarkable times.

In the spirit of these times, Blanche is not a traditional DOJ official but rather an avatar for the client he worked to keep out of jail ahead of the 2024 election. Now the two have moved offices to Washington and have the power of the United States government behind them.

One of the ways they used that power was when Blanche personally conducted what was, in theory, a “proffer” interview of Maxwell last year while she was incarcerated in a Florida prison to see what information she had related to Epstein.

On the one hand, Blanche was an unusual representative for that assignment, because there were other prosecutors who had worked on the matter for years and were more knowledgeable about it than a high-ranking DOJ official would be.

Yet, line prosecutors without a personal stake in trying to appease the president might not have focused on the sort of questions that gave Maxwell a clear opportunity to exonerate Trump — at least, in the convicted child sex trafficker’s view. At one point in the interview with Blanche, she said the president “was never inappropriate with anybody. In the times that I was with him, he was a gentleman in all respects.”

Maxwell was subsequently moved to a more comfortable, lower-security confinement in Texas, and her lawyer has been pressing for clemency.

Against that backdrop, and the general backdrop of Tuesday’s hearing, in which Blanche defended the president’s latest apparent corruption, it was notable that he agreed with Van Hollen’s request. That the senator even thought to ask should have registered as offensive to Blanche, but perhaps not in the timeline we’re living in.

Importantly, even if the acting attorney general keeps his word on the Maxwell pledge, there’s no impediment to Trump pardoning her or anyone else, no matter what the DOJ recommends. It’s entirely up to the president whom to pardon.

Blanche’s pledge might have carried more practical weight if he were working in a more traditional administration that hewed to a conventional pardon application process. But if he were working in such an administration, then Van Hollen wouldn’t have needed to ask the question in the first place.

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