Trump’s Attorney General Shut Down CNN’s Dana Bash Over Her Bonkers January 6 Comparison

On January 6, 2021, rioters stormed the United States Capitol while lawmakers certified the election.

Dana Bash just tried to connect that day to a brand new Justice Department lawsuit.

Trump's attorney general told her to stop it the moment she went there.

Bash Tried to Connect a Ballot Lawsuit to January 6

Trump's attorney general, Todd Blanche, sat down with Dana Bash on CNN's State of the Union to answer for a new Justice Department lawsuit filed in Alaska.

Bash pushed a specific theory at him.

She suggested the lawsuit was laying groundwork for Donald Trump to contest an election result he does not like.

She then raised the possibility of a repeat of January 6.

Blanche cut her off instantly.

"Oh, stop it!" he told her on live television.

He added that she was not treating the question like a real person would.

Blanche insisted the lawsuit has nothing to do with overturning any result nationwide.

He said the department is not laying any groundwork for Trump to contest an election, and called her entire premise false.

Bash pressed back and accused Blanche of trying to set her up with his answer.

She countered that she would have raised the same concern long before January 6 ever happened.

She also noted that Trump himself has publicly taken credit for directing the lawsuit.

Trump told a reporter in September that he believes his attorney general has a strong legal case against the ballot scheme.

Blanche rejected Bash's framing of that admission as proof of some hidden political motive.

An attorney general publicly backing his department's lawsuit is not a scandal.

It is the opposite of hiding the ball, and Bash treated it like a confession anyway.

Blanche separately posted that the department does not seek to stop a single ballot from being cast.

That single sentence undercuts the entire coup premise Bash built her question around.

The Ballot Trick That Actually Triggered the DOJ Lawsuit

Bash's entire line of questioning skipped past the actual reason the Justice Department sued Alaska in the first place.

A second candidate named Daniel Sullivan filed to run against Republican Sen. Dan Sullivan this cycle.

The real Sullivan did not stay quiet about it.

"He's purposely trying to trick my constituents to rig the election for Peltola," Sullivan said.

Legal scholar Jonathan Turley has documented how that candidacy took shape.

The man had voted for years as Daniel J. Sullivan, Jr., then asked election officials to list him on the ballot simply as Dan Sullivan.

He had no history as a Republican before launching the campaign, and he once tried registering under just the initial "S," which would have matched the incumbent exactly.

His campaign materials echoed the color scheme and branding the real Senator Sullivan already uses.

Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher reviewed the filing herself and disqualified the candidate, finding he filed his paperwork to confuse voters and compromise the ballot's fairness.

Turley has also flagged the candidate's connection to Amber Lee, a Democratic consultant who previously backed Peltola.

A conservative watchdog group has since filed a federal complaint alleging Lee advised the decoy campaign while simultaneously sitting on the board of a group that spent roughly $575,000 attacking the real Senator Sullivan.

"You can't both work for the campaign and work for the outside group," the watchdog's director said flatly.

Under Alaska's top-four primary system, the decoy candidacy alone could have advanced into the general election simply by splitting the real Senator Sullivan's vote.

The ACLU has already filed a separate challenge trying to block the Justice Department's lawsuit entirely.

Nobody at CNN asked Blanche a single question about any of that history during the October 25 interview.

She skipped straight to January 6, a comparison with no connection to a ballot-naming trick in a Senate race.

What Bash Skipped Past to Get to Jan 6

Bash had a chance to ask Blanche about actual ballot fraud in a Senate race and chose a four-year-old riot instead.

That choice says everything about how CNN frames any Trump-era Justice Department action.

Name it plainly.

A Democratic operative-adjacent dirty trick against a sitting Republican senator became, in Bash's hands, evidence that Trump's own Justice Department poses the threat.

Blanche is not a natural television brawler, and he still refused to let that framing stand unchallenged.

CNN had an attorney general on camera and chased an old riot instead of asking about the ballot scheme sitting in front of them.

Alaska voters are the ones who deserve an answer about who tried to rig their ballot with a fake Dan Sullivan.

Instead they got a CNN anchor more interested in resurrecting January 6 than in the dirty trick playing out in their Senate race right now.

Sources:

• Mary Lou Masters, "'Oh, Stop It!': Todd Blanche Cuts Off Dana Bash's Speculating How Trump Admin's Election Lawsuit Could Lead to Another Jan 6," Daily Caller, October 25, 2026.
• Jonathan Turley, "By Any Means Necessary: Candidate Struck From Alaska Ballot Over Alleged Democratic Dirty Trick," JonathanTurley.org, June 16, 2026.
• Chris Williams, "Dan Sullivan vs. Dan Sullivan: Alaska GOP Senator Claims Ballot 'Dirty Trick,'" FOX5 Atlanta, June 3, 2026.
• Hank Berrien, "'Decoy Dan' Accused of Illegal Coordination in Critical Senate Race," The Daily Wire, September 8, 2026.