EXCLUSIVE: Republican Senators Make Big Demand Of Todd Blanche Ahead Of Confirmation Vote

A group of Republican lawmakers are urging acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to bring long-awaited clarity to the gruesome deaths of five premie-sized babies recovered from a Washington, D.C., abortion clinic in 2022.

Utah Senator Mike Lee and Congressman Chris Smith of New Jersey, along with more than 50 other lawmakers, are calling on Blanche to “comprehensively investigate the circumstances surrounding the deaths of five preborn children” whose remains “were recovered by the Metropolitan Police Department in 2022, after they were allegedly aborted in the Washington Surgi-Clinic operated by the late-term abortionist Dr. Cesare Santangelo.”

“For four years, members of Congress have remained alarmed at this clear violation of life and law, but the Biden Administration Department of Justice refused to act,” the lawmakers write in a letter exclusively obtained by The Daily Wire, noting that their remains are in the possession of the D.C. Medical Examiner and calling on Blanche to find out if the babies “were victims of the crimes of infanticide or partial-birth abortion.”

Blanche, who has been acting attorney general since April, is in the midst of a confirmation battle on Capitol Hill. Blanche faced the Senate Judiciary Committee last week in a two-day hearing where Republican and Democrat lawmakers alike questioned him about the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, among other issues.

Lee and three other signatories of Tuesday’s letter — Senators Chuck Grassley, Ted Cruz, and Josh Hawley — all serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Blanche will need their votes to get to a full floor vote, and then for confirmation. As the committee prepares to vote, the signatories are calling Blanche to conduct a “thorough investigation into the death of each child, including autopsies of the infants and the preservation of all collected evidence.”

That is not all, however: they also want the babies to be properly buried.

“We cannot undo the grievous, barbaric acts that killed these children in their most vulnerable stage, but we equally cannot allow such lawlessness and inhumanity to evade our justice system any longer,” the letter reads. “Under President Trump’s and your leadership, we are hopeful that these children will finally receive the justice they deserve.”

Pro-life activists Lauren Handy and Terrisa Bukovinac originally discovered the baby bodies in boxes outside a Foggy Bottom abortion clinic in 2022 shortly before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The Daily Wire has extensively reported on Washington’s lack of interest in how these fully formed babies died.

Advocates and Republican lawmakers have sounded the alarm for years about these babies, warning that they appear to have been brutally and illegally aborted in violation of federal law, but the Biden administration took no steps to properly investigate the matter, instead targeting the women who recovered the bodies.

Doctors estimated to The Daily Wire in 2022 that several of the babies were the victims of late-term abortions — and that at least one baby may have been aborted using illegal partial-birth abortion methods, showing “deep lacerations to the posterior neck which presumably correlates to the method of abortion used to end her life.”

“If this baby girl was alive when the abortionist made these lacerations, then her death directly violated the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003 (18 U.S. Code § 1531), which criminalizes the partial deliverance of a living child for the purpose of performing an overt act that intentionally takes the life of the child,” they wrote.

The lawmakers also point to the estimations of pro-life doctors, noting that one baby boy was estimated to be around 28 to 32 weeks, while another baby looked “like he should have been in the nursery” and was “about the same size as [her] granddaughter when she was born.”

Lee and Smith called on Attorney General Merrick Garland to conduct an investigation into the babies in 2022, as The Daily Wire first reported at the time, but the Justice Department never investigated or responded.

“On the contrary, after two years of inaction, reports indicated that the Department of Justice advised the Chief Medical Examiner to discard the bodies of the infants,” Lee and Smith write in their letter. “Fortunately, members of Congress were able to intervene with the Chief Medical Examiner and urge him to preserve the bodies.”

As recently as April, Republican Reps. Chip Roy (TX) and Andy Biggs (AZ) pushed FBI Director Kash Patel to investigate the babies and their deaths.

Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department immediately responded to requests for comment.