So, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Donald Trump blinked first, or appeared to do so, and agreed to issue a formal order ending the $1.776 “anti-weaponization fund” to pay off Trump political cronies, including those convicted after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and insurrection attempt.
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It was a stunt, of course, to get the confirmation votes of Republican Senators John Cornyn and Thom Tilles today to move Blanche’s confirmation out of the Judiciary Committee. This written validation that a legal settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against his own government supposedly will be enough to satisfy Cornyn and Tilles about Blanche’s “independence” from Trump.
Even this very narrow deal does not eliminate the possibility – or probability – that Trump’s Justice Department will seek alternative routes to compensate his political allies. As Cornyn himself laid out in hearings, the settlement is a “contract” that must be invalidated by the parties in court to be legally valid.
Blanche’s announcement did little to allay concerns that the emergent deal only narrows but does not invalidate the part of the lawsuit settlement that absolves Trump and his family from any past IRS tax violations – a finding worth upwards of $100 million to Trump personally. It is that very settlement that courts have found legally troubling as a sham lawsuit that essentially allows Trump to collect a very large reward for questionable business practices over years.
Nor does it explain Blanche’s continuing agreeableness to bring charges against Trump’s perceived political enemies, to forcing out dozens of seasoned federal prosecutors in Trump’s snit against his own federal criminal cases, to file embarrassingly thin prosecutions for outwardly political cases, for turning whole sections of Justice upside-down to ignore white-collar crimes and Civil Rights cases. It is Blanche who has directed the government’s disastrous response to the Epstein Files.
In short, whatever this announcement achieved for Blanche’s positive vote count on a Republican-majority Senate committee, it doesn’t come close to offering a reason to confirm Blanche as the nation’s top law enforcer.
The bigger question is what Blanche has done at all to earn public trust in a Justice Department that not only bows to Trump in his political revenge campaign but invites it.
What We Know
Blanche’s new documents, which followed two weeks of negotiation with Cornyn, put in writing that “the (anti-weaponization) Fund is not moving forward” and that “today’s Order officially rescinds the May 18, 2026, Order.” Blanche noted that he had made such promises verbally before the senators previously.
A second, unsigned document also limits the scope of another provision of the settlement that provided broad immunity for Trump and members of his family from tax audits. It clarifies that the tax audit immunity agreement “applies only retroactively” to claims open at the time of the settlement and does not protect the president from examination of future tax filings.
Since the confirmation hearing, Trump has been pushing publicly for the restoration of the fund, and vowed to keep Blanche in an acting role if there is no confirmation. As recently as Sunday, Trump said that people who had faced charges had “their lives destroyed” and “this would be a reimbursement for the pain that they suffered.”
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In a social media post, Senator Tillis wrote that Mr. Trump “clearly intends to resurrect the payout pot for punks either by inappropriately establishing another bogus fund or pushing Congress to vote for a bill that the majority of Republicans in the Senate would be against.”
Even in its new form, the Blanche’s agreement that the IRS abandon any audit of Trump’s previous tax returns is an unprecedented and potentially illegal benefit to a sitting president.
And none of this resolves the federal court case in which a judge has said the Justice Department must prove that the entire Trump lawsuit against the IRS was a “sham.”
What is Unsaid
This is the same Blanche who has allowed two separate financial settlement payouts totaling over $1.28 million to Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser who pleaded guilty to lying to Congress. That happened in the settlement of individual lawsuits that preceded the settlement fund. Flynn had sought $50 million in damages, alleging that he was a victim of malicious prosecution and political targeting during Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election.
The Trump Justice Department has approved individual multimillion-dollar payouts using taxpayer money to settle civil lawsuits filed by the family of Ashli Babbitt, a Jan. 6 rioter killed as she breached the Capitol and Mark Houck, an anti-abortion activist for $1.1 million following his previous high-profile federal prosecution and acquittal.
As part of his pardons and commutations, Trump wiped out court-ordered debts worth nearly $2 billion in financial penalties to a variety ofwhite-collar felons and corporate fraudsters.
As Assistant Attorney General and the Acting head of Justice, Blanche has racked up dozens of changes that have hollowed out antitrust, Civil Rights, counterintelligence and fraud investigations. He has made Justice a partner in mass deportations, coming up with increasingly creative ways to skip hearings for migrants and to bring charges against protesters. He has gone after Trump opponents with such poor cases that he faces court-referred charges before the New York bar, and he has antagonized federal judges for bringing evidence-free charges. \
He has made Justice an arm of the White House.
The idea that this pressured document signing signals a Justice Department independent of Trump is a joke. The suggestion that this document, porous as it may be, is a reason to confirm him as Attorney General is nonsense.
Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.
