The fund was supposed to be dead. Trump said so himself. Then the Senate balked at confirming Todd Blanche as attorney general, and the dead fund got up and walked.
Blanche is Trump’s former personal lawyer and deputy attorney general. He has run the Justice Department since April, when Trump fired Pam Bondi, and the Senate has been sitting on his nomination since June. The obstacle is a $1.8 billion fund.
The fund came out of a settlement between the president and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump dropped a $10 billion lawsuit against the tax agency, and the Justice Department agreed to create a $1.8 billion payout pool for victims of what the administration calls government weaponization. The name tells you what it is: money for people who say the government came after them.
Senate Republicans did not like it. Some of them, notably Thom Tillis of North Carolina and John Cornyn of Texas, pressed Blanche on whether violent criminals would be eligible for payouts. The fund nearly derailed a must-pass budget reconciliation bill. Blanche walked it back, said the agency would recant the fund, and Trump declared it dead.
That was last month. This week the calculation changed. The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to reconsider Blanche’s nomination early next week, and the president has decided that the fund is alive again. Approve his lawyer, or the payouts come back. That is the offer, stated in plain terms by the president, reported by both the New York Times and USA Today. The president has also floated a second threat: pull the nomination entirely and wait until the senators who want concessions leave office.
The mechanics are remarkable. The man whose confirmation is at stake is the president’s own defense lawyer, the lawyer who defended him in court and is now being asked to run the department that prosecuted him. The fund that blocks his confirmation pays people who claim the government weaponized itself against them. And the president is now using that fund as a weapon against his own party’s senators.
The senators see it. Chuck Grassley, the Judiciary Committee chairman, calls Blanche well-qualified and praises his commitment to law and order. Dick Durbin, the ranking Democrat, takes the other view, saying Trump has engaged in the most corrupt enterprise in the history of the presidency and that Blanche apparently has not noticed.
Both statements are about the same man and the same fund. The fund exists to compensate the victims of government abuse. It was created by a settlement between a president and his own tax agency. Its money would be handed out by the department Blanche is nominated to lead. And it is now the lever in a fight between the president and the Republican senators he needs to confirm him.
Trump named the fund against weaponization. Then he made it a weapon. The Senate will now decide whether the man who walked the fund back once can be trusted to run the department that will administer it, and the president has made clear what happens if they say no. The slush fund, dead last month, is the price of peace this month.
The committee meets early next week. The fund will not be on the agenda. It will be in the room.