Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, said Wednesday he would continue to hold up nominations in the Justice Department over the targeting by the Biden administration of former President Donald Trump.

Special counsel Jack Smith secured a four-count indictment of Trump in August relating to the former president’s efforts to contest the results of the 2020 election, months after a federal grand jury issued a 37-count indictment against Trump in June based on an investigation into allegations surrounding classified documents.

Some of Trump’s top rivals for the Republican nomination for president in 2024—Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy—have condemned the indictment as a weaponization of the Justice Department.

“This whole policy that I’ve implemented on Department of Justice nominees is unprecedented,” Vance said on the Senate floor, referencing a complaint by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “He mentions that we have, in the past, this body, before I got here, approved a number of Department of Justice nominees through unanimous consent. What the senator from Illinois doesn’t mention, Madam President, is that in that time, when these nominations sailed through unanimous consent, the Department of Justice was not trying to throw the political rival of the president of the United States in prison.”

He added:

I object to this because we are living in a banana republic, where the president is using his Department of Justice to go after his chief political rival, the person he will appear on the ballot with in about a year.

If the Department of Justice will use these nominations for a law instead of politics, I am happy to end this whole policy. But so long as the Department of Justice uses its nominations and uses its personnel to go after its political opponents, from the president of the United States on down, I will object. Because of that, Madam President, I do object.

Vance announced the hold on Justice Department nominations in a June 13 release, citing the indictment of Trump.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., has been holding up most senior military promotions since March to protest the Pentagon’s policy of paying for female service members to travel for out-of-state abortions after a number of states placed restrictions on the procedure.

Originally published by the Daily Caller News Foundation

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