The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote Tuesday morning on Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general, two days after Blanche signed an order shutting down a Justice Department fund that would have paid people who said the federal government was weaponized against them.
Blanche, President Donald Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, has run the department as acting attorney general since Trump dismissed Pam Bondi in April. He posted two orders Sunday night, ABC7 News reported. One terminated the Anti-Weaponization Fund. The other narrowed the reach of the tax settlement that created it.
Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, the two Republicans who had blocked the nomination in committee, said Monday they would vote to advance it. “We are pleased that the Department of Justice has issued a formal order terminating the anti-weaponization fund,” the senators said in a joint statement. Cornyn told reporters that he and Tillis “got a stake driven through the heart of the weaponization fund,” according to CBS News, and said Blanche “did what we asked him to do.”
The Justice Department said the order “establishes, beyond any doubt, that there is no Fund,” PBS News reported. The same report said Cornyn and Tillis had held up the nomination while demanding written confirmation that the fund was dead.
What the fund was
The department announced the fund on May 18. It was to hold $1.776 billion drawn from the federal Judgment Fund, Time reported. A five-member commission appointed by the attorney general, with one member chosen in consultation with congressional leadership, would have heard claims from people who said the government had targeted them on political, personal or ideological grounds. The commission could issue cash awards and formal apologies, the filing deadline was set for December 15, 2028, and money left over would revert to the federal government.
The fund came out of a settlement of a lawsuit Trump filed against the Internal Revenue Service on January 29, 2026, seeking at least $10 billion in damages over an IRS contractor’s illegal leak of his tax returns, Reason reported. Trump, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization dropped that suit, along with claims tied to the 2022 FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and the investigations into Russian election interference. They received a formal apology and no damages.
Announcing the fund in May, Blanche said, “The machinery of government should never be weaponized against any American.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren called it “an insane level of corruption” and described the fund as a slush fund for January 6 insurrectionists and Trump’s political allies, Time reported. The program would have let people claiming government weaponization seek compensation, raising concern that people convicted over the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol could receive taxpayer payments, CBS News reported.
What the second order does
Blanche’s second order states that the settlement’s tax protections cover only Trump, his two sons and the Trump Organization, and only returns that have already been filed. Cornyn and Tillis said the department confirmed in writing that the protections do not extend to affiliated organizations.
Legal experts questioned whether the rescission explicitly bars the department from paying people who took part in the Capitol riot, ABC7 News reported.
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said Blanche told him in a private meeting before his confirmation hearing, “What more can I do? What more can I say? I made a mistake.” Durbin said he pressed the nominee to put the reversal in writing, and that Blanche offered to work with Congress to codify it, according to Durbin’s account.
Trump voiced support for the fund while the negotiations were under way, PBS News reported. After the committee delayed its first scheduled vote, he suggested withdrawing Blanche’s nomination and resubmitting it once Cornyn and Tillis had left office. Both senators’ terms end in January, ABC7 News reported.
The committee vote is set for 9 a.m. Tuesday. If the nomination advances, it goes to the full Senate, where Republicans hold 53 seats.
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