WASHINGTON — Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis confirmed Monday they will vote to advance Todd Blanche’s nomination for Attorney General out of the Senate Judiciary Committee after the acting DOJ chief formally terminated a $1.776 billion fund established earlier this year for victims of purported government weaponization.
“From the outset, we were clear that we needed a written document addressing our concerns on the IRS audit agreement and the anti-weaponization fund,” Cornyn (R-Texas) and Tillis (R-NC) said in a joint statement.
“We are pleased that the Department of Justice has issued a formal order terminating the anti-weaponization fund … We want to express our gratitude to Mr. Blanche and his staff for working with us on this, and we look forward to voting to advance his nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee soon.”
The Judiciary panel, which is chaired by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), has scheduled the vote on Blanche for Tuesday morning.
Late Sunday, the acting AG formally rescinded a May 18 order establishing the anti-weaponization fund, declaring that it “shall have no force or effect.”
Blanche had already said the fund was “dead” in a July 15 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Cornyn and Tillis had insisted on getting that promise in writing.
The fund, which would have been overseen by a five-member panel that would approve payouts to victims of perceived political prosecutions, resulted from President Trump’s settlement with the Department of Justice of his $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS.
The 2024 suit followed the 2019 leak of Trump’s and family members’ confidential tax returns to The New York Times by IRS contractor Chaz Littlejohn.
Littlejohn, who also shared tax records of thousands of other wealthy Americans with ProPublica, pleaded guilty to the unauthorized disclosures and was sentenced to five years in prison in January 2024.
The DOJ also clarified language in the initial settlement to show that the Trump family has only been given limited immunity for past tax audits, and not future scrutiny.
Despite Blanche backtracking, Trump has maintained support for the fund.
“I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused. This has nothing to do with Todd; this was me,” Trump said at a Camp David cabinet meeting Friday. “And I’d like to see them compensated for the pain. They lost their families. They committed suicide.”
