As last week neared its end, Senate Judiciary Chair Chuck Grassley rescheduled a planned vote on Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination, announcing that the panel would take up the matter on Tuesday. At the time, the move was largely aspirational: There was no agreement to advance Blanche, but the Iowa Republican hoped a deal might take shape.
Roughly 48 hours later, The Associated Press reported:
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche issued a formal order late Sunday terminating President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate his political allies, a move that follows weeks of negotiations with two Republican senators who were blocking his nomination to become attorney general.
A spokeswoman for Texas Sen. John Cornyn, one of the senators holding up Blanche’s nomination, confirmed the deal, which comes ahead of a Tuesday confirmation vote for Blanche’s nomination in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In a statement accompanying the order, the Justice Department said that “although the Acting Attorney General has repeatedly advised Congress through testimony, including under oath, as well as in written responses, that the Fund is not moving forward, and the Department has repeatedly represented to district courts that the Fund is not moving forward, today’s Order officially rescinds the May 18, 2026 Order.”
As became obvious last week, at least two Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee — Cornyn and Thom Tillis of North Carolina — have focused their concerns on a rather specific point. As MS NOW has reported, both GOP senators, who are poised to exit Capitol Hill at the end of the year, “say the Trump administration has yet to satisfy their demands on Trump’s IRS settlement. The pair is asking Blanche to formally kill the so-called anti-weaponization fund and narrow the scope of the IRS audit immunity afforded to Trump, his family, his businesses and others under the agreement.”
The process proved complex and serpentine, but late Sunday night, the nominee appeared to check a box: His Republican skeptics wanted documentary evidence that the compensation fund — widely criticized by both parties as a “slush fund” — and Blanche finally produced such a document.
This marked an important development, but instead of resolving the broader controversy, it generated a new set of questions.
Cornyn appears satisfied, but what about his GOP colleagues? The Texas Republican helped take the lead on the intraparty pushback, but other GOP senators also expressed serious reservations, and they haven’t yet said publicly whether they’re prepared to support the nominee’s confirmation.
Is Blanche’s new document binding? It’s an open question as to whether Blanche — or more to the point, Donald Trump — could simply issue a new order rescinding the document the nominee produced on Sunday night.
Will senators believe the nominee or his boss? Blanche’s new order tries to add a degree of formality to what he’s been telling senators for weeks: The fund is dead. The president who appointed him, however, has spent the last several days pushing the opposite line, insisting that he still wants and expects to have a taxpayer-financed fund to be used to reward his political allies, including Jan. 6 rioters.
Indeed, as recently as Saturday morning, Trump published an item to his social media platform stating that he’s prepared to “push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill … PASSED.” Pointing to legislation that does not exist, the Republican added, “It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done.”
On Sunday night, during a brief Q&A with reporters on Air Force One, the president again said he wanted a fund to serve as “a reimbursement for the pain” his allies suffered. He added, referring to himself in third person, “A lot of people like it. A lot of big supporters of Trump like it.” (Of course they like it; they’re hoping for generous payouts.)
In other words, even as Blanche scrambles to convince the relevant players that the fund is no more, his boss clearly has contradictory ambitions, which should raise all kinds of red flags for senators concerned about the underlying issue.
What about the IRS immunity shield? In a separate document, the attorney general nominee sought to bring new clarity to the other concern raised by Cornyn and Tillis. This second, unsigned, statement says that the audit-immunity deal only shields the president, his company and his family members from audits.
Except, that’s not much of a concession. As The New York Times reported, “Still, even in its new form, Mr. Blanche’s order for the I.R.S. to abandon any audits of Mr. Trump’s previous tax returns is an unprecedented and potentially illegal benefit to a sitting president, worth potentially tens of millions of dollars in lower taxes and avoided penalties.”
What about the administration’s other financial spigots? While the fate of Trump’s $1.776 billion compensation fund continues to generate worthy attention, let’s not forget that the White House continues to arrange for generous payouts, financed entirely by American taxpayers, to the president’s political allies through dubious settlement agreements. If members such as Cornyn and Tillis have a problem with the underlying idea, this should be of interest to them, too.
As this week gets underway, Blanche’s odds are stronger than when last week came to an end, but the process isn’t over just yet. Watch this space.
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