PARIS (AP) — Old rivals Paris Saint-Germain and Marseille come back to Ligue 1 with a sour taste after completing the Champions League phase.
Reigning European champion PSG was dull in attack in a 1-1 draw with Newcastle that dropped Luis Enrique's side out of the top eight and into the playoffs.
For Marseille, the 1993 Champions League winner, Wednesday evening was awful after losing 3–0 at Club Brugge and getting eliminated.
The lone bright spot among the French teams came from Monaco after the Principality club secured a playoffs spot by holding Juventus to a goalless draw.
PSG, which took control of Ligue 1 last week, will look to regroup at Strasbourg on Sunday. It's not an easy task as Strasbourg has been unbeaten since coach Gary O’Neil replaced Liam Rosenior following his fellow Englishman’s departure to Premier League club Chelsea.
Strasbourg, led by striker Joaquín Panichelli — who has has taken Ligue 1 by storm with 11 goals — thrashed Lille last weekend to climb to seventh place. It has lost just twice at home this season.
Lens, which slipped to second after losing at Marseille, hosts Le Havre on Friday. That defeat brought an end to Lens’ 10-game winning streak across all competitions.
“Frustration is a feeling we hadn’t experienced for quite some time,” Lens coach Pierre Sage said. "The most important thing is being able to bounce back.”
Third-place Marseille, five points behind Lens and seven adrift of PSG, will be eager to put behind its woeful night in Brugge when it travels to Paris FC on Saturday.
Marseille recruits Ethan Nwaneri and Quinten Timber had immediate impacts during their debut against Lens. Loan signing Nwaneri scored a superb goal against Lens while Timber, who signed from Feyenoord to June 2030, impressed in midfield in a box-to-box role. Unfortunately for coach Roberto De Zerbi, they are unavailable for the trip to Brugge.
Lens is plagued with injuries and will be missing Jhoanner Chávez, Arthur Masuaku, Samson Baidoo, Régis Gurtner and Jonathan Gradit.
PSG will be without star winger Khvicha Kvaratskhelia, who limped off with a right ankle injury against Newcastle on Wednesday. The club confirmed Thursday that he has suffered an ankle sprain and is expected to be sidelined for eight to 10 days.
U.S.-based Black Knight Football Club group became the sole shareholder of Lorient. The Black Knight consortium fronted by American businessman Bill Foley, which owns the Vegas Golden Knights in the NHL, acquired a minority ownership interest in Lorient in January 2023 as part of its multi-club ownership strategy.
It also owns Premier League club Bournemouth, Moreirense FC in Portugal and Auckland FC in New Zealand.
The group is bringing more than $550 million in equity. Lorient is ninth in Ligue 1 after 19 matches and hosts Nantes on Saturday.
AP soccer: https://apnews.com/hub/soccer
Monaco's Folarin Balogun, centre, and Juventus' Pierre Kalulu challenge for the ball during the Champions League opening phase soccer match between Monaco and Juventus in Monaco, Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Philippe Magoni)
Brugge's Romeo Vermant, right, celebrates after scoring his sides second goal during the Champions League opening phase soccer match between Club Brugge and Marseille in Bruges, Belgium, Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)
Newcastle's Lewis Hall is challenged by PSG's Joao Neves, left, during a Champions League opening phase soccer match between Paris Saint-Germain and Newcastle in Wednesday, Jan. 28, 2026. (AP Photo/Michel Euler)
WASHINGTON (AP) — When acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed off on a nearly $1.8 billion fund meant to compensate President Donald Trump's allies for alleged political prosecution, he may have pleased his boss.
But the eyebrow-raising move — the latest in his push to prove his loyalty to Trump — has agitated the same Republican lawmakers if he is nominated for the permanent job.
Blanche insists he’s not auditioning for the job of attorney general. But a succession of splashy steps the Justice Department has taken under his watch since he took the position on an acting basis last month, including an indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, has left no doubt about the impression he’s hoping to make on the president who appointed him.
The fund in particular has put Blanche at the center of a Republican firestorm at a time when he aims to establish himself as the perfect person for the job for the remainder of Trump’s term. And it sharpened concerns from Democrats and other Blanche critics that he has not shed his mantle as the president’s personal attorney.
“So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong — Take your pick,” Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the former majority leader, said in a statement.
A former federal prosecutor in New York, Blanche came to public prominence for his lead role on Trump's defense team, including during the Republican's hush money trial in New York. That perch afforded him, he has said, a firsthand look at what he contends was the weaponization of the criminal justice system against Trump.
He was brought into the Justice Department as deputy attorney general, the No. 2 job, then was elevated last month after Trump ousted Pam Bondi.
Now he finds himself the latest Trump-appointed attorney general to simultaneously confront expectations from subordinates to uphold institutional norms and demands from the president to do his bidding.
Trump's first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, was forced out after the 2018 midterms after infuriating the president over his recusal from an investigation into ties between Russia and the 2016 presidential campaign. Another, William Barr, resigned after their relationship fizzled over Barr's refusal to back Trump's baseless claims of massive election fraud. Bondi was removed after struggling to bring successful prosecutions against Trump's political opponents.
Two weeks after becoming acting attorney general, Blanche announced the appointment of Joseph diGenova, an 81-year-old former Justice Department prosecutor from the Reagan administration, to a special position inside the department. He'll oversee a Florida-based investigation into whether former law enforcement and intelligence officials conspired over the last decade to undermine Trump.
“At some point, at the right time, that will be made public and the American people will see exactly what happened to this administration and President Trump over the past decade," Blanche told Fox News.
Prior government reviews of the FBI's Trump-Russia investigation, a centerpiece of the current conspiracy investigation, have failed to produce criminal charges against senior officials or evidence of criminal conduct by them. It's not clear what, if any, new information the continuing investigation has developed.
The Justice Department also last month obtained an indictment charging Comey, a Trump foe whose prosecution the president has long called for, with threatening Trump through a social media photo of seashells in the numerical arrangement of “86 47" — a case legal experts say will be challenging for prosecutors. Comey has said he wouldn't be surprised if the Justice Department pursues additional indictments.
In other moves, Blanche announced an indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that has been the target of conservative outrage, with misleading donors about its activities, and has publicly defended a Justice Department crackdown on leaks to the news media, including subpoenas to reporters.
Arguably the most audacious demonstration of loyalty to Trump came this week when the Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate people who feel they've been unjustly investigated and prosecuted, coupled with a guarantee of immunity from tax audits for Trump and his eldest sons.
As Republican concerns grew, Blanche held a tense meeting with GOP lawmakers Thursday. Shortly afterward, Senate Republicans abruptly left Washington without voting on a roughly $70 billion bill to fund immigration enforcement agencies.
Blanche, who defended the fund at a congressional hearing this week, has said anyone who believes they've been persecuted can apply for compensation regardless of political affiliation. But the fund has been widely understood as a boon to Trump allies investigated during the Biden administration.
“It’s pretty clear that he’s not the attorney general for the United States as much as he's the attorney general for President Trump,” said Stephen Saltzburg, a George Washington University law professor and senior Justice Department official in the 1980s. He said Blanche would get an A+ if report cards were issued for fealty to Trump.
David Laufman, a former chief of staff to the deputy attorney general in President George W. Bush's administration, said that rather than protecting the Justice Department's independence, Blanche has been a “willing and ardent accomplice for carrying out any partisan or corrupt scheme the White House may devise.”
Blanche’s supporters dismiss the suggestion he is trying to curry favor with Trump to secure the permanent job.
“What he is doing is he is seeking justice based on facts and the law,” said Jay Town, who served as a U.S. attorney in Alabama during the first Trump administration. “And I don’t think that will ever change about him, whether he is the attorney general going forward or doesn’t spend another day in the administration. He is an honorable man and anybody that knows him knows that to be true.”
Blanche also says he is not angling to keep his job or feeling pressure to placate Trump.
He has told reporters he would be honored to be nominated but, "if he chooses to nominate somebody else and asks me to go do something else, I will say, ‘Thank you very much. I love you, sir.’ I don’t have any goals or aspirations beyond that.”
In recent days, he's functioned as the fund's public face and most visible defender, a role consistent with his comfort in the spotlight. He sometimes holds multiple press conferences a week and grants interviews to a variety of news outlets, a contrast to Bondi, who largely stuck to Fox News appearances.
His defenders say his experience as a federal prosecutor has made him a more sophisticated communicator for the department than Bondi, but his statements have at times invited backlash, including his refusal to rule out that violent Jan. 6 rioters could be eligible for payouts.
Though Blanche will appoint the five commissioners tasked with processing claims, his precise role in the fund’s implementation is unclear. He told CNN it was developed through negotiations with Trump’s private lawyers, not him.
For some Democrats, that's a difference without a distinction.
“Mr. Attorney General, you are acting today like the president's personal attorney," Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, told Blanche during a combative exchange in the Senate hearing, "and that's the whole problem."
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche arrives for a closed-door meeting with Republican senators who are expected to abandon a proposal for $1 billion in security money for the White House complex and President Donald Trump's ballroom after it has failed to win enough party support, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, May 21, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche arrives for a closed-door meeting with Republican senators who are expected to abandon a proposal for $1 billion in security money for the White House complex and President Donald Trump's ballroom after it has failed to win enough party support, at the Capitol in Washington, Thursday, May 21, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
