WASHINGTON — After experiencing some turbulence last week, Todd Blanche’s nomination to be attorney general appears to be back on course.
The acting attorney general released an order Sunday night officially declaring dead the nearly $1.8-billion so-called anti-weaponization fund that would have given payments to allies of President Trump. A separate press release also placed limits on tax audit immunity granted to Trump, two of his sons and their businesses.
Those announcements were enough to persuade two holdout Republican lawmakers, Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, on Monday to end their opposition, clearing the biggest obstacle to Blanche’s nomination.
The fund and the immunity were the product of a settlement from a lawsuit brought by Trump, two of his sons and their businesses against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of tax documents.
While the memo appears to have cleared the immediate hurdles Blanche faced for his confirmation, critics of the deal expressed doubts about whether it really is dead.
“These assurances are not worth the paper they’re written on. They don’t pull back on the ongoing attempts to give the President, his family, and his affiliates unauthorized immunity from tax audits,” said Brandon DeBot, policy director of the Tax Law Center at NYU Law
Trump continued to express support for the fund Sunday, saying that it would reimburse people charged in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the U.S. Capitol “for the pain they suffered.”
“A lot of people like it,” Trump said.
The terms of the settlement had become a sticking point for Cornyn and Tillis, whose support in the Senate Judiciary Committee was crucial for Blanche’s nomination to advance to the Senate floor for final confirmation.
The committee postponed its vote on Blanche’s nomination last week over their concerns.
“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 that included constraining the scope of audit protection by limiting it to the parties of the Settlement Agreement and legally ending the anti-weaponization fund,” the senators wrote in a joint statement.
The memo released by Blanche addressed “concerns that multiple of our Republican colleagues share,” they wrote, and they expressed “gratitude” to him for working with them on resolving the issue.
The committee is expected to vote Tuesday on whether to advance Blanche’s nomination to the Senate floor.
Republicans hold a slim majority in the Senate, which has been made narrower by the ongoing absence of Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
That will put a spotlight on his support among a few key Senate Republicans who have shown a willingness to buck Trump in the past, including outgoing Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who faces reelection this year.
None of their offices replied to requests for comment on whether they currently support Blanche.
Critics of the IRS settlement deal said that Blanche’s memo doesn’t rule out the possibility of the plan being revived again.
“This supposed ‘deal’ doesn’t prevent payouts to violent insurrectionists in the future,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote on X. “It doesn’t prevent the admin from bringing the slush fund back from the dead next week or using DOJ’s Judgment Fund for the same illicit purpose.”
The “anti-weaponization” fund was initially put on hold in May by a federal judge in Virginia in response to a lawsuit brought on behalf of a former federal prosecutor and several other groups by the progressive legal nonprofit Democracy Forward.
The group sent a letter Monday to the Justice Department asking it to file court documents attesting to the fund being dead.
“They want the American public and lawmakers to believe that the weaponization fund is dead, but they refuse to sign sworn statements,” Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, said in an interview with The Times. “Without more, we have no confidence in this.”
The group also asked the Justice Department whether modifications to the settlement had the support of Trump, his two sons and their businesses, who brought the lawsuit.
Last month, a federal judge in Florida wrote a blistering decision calling the settlement improper and pointing out that the parties — Trump and an agency he oversees — were not actually independent of each other.
Blanche’s independence from Trump was a recurring theme during his confirmation process.
Before taking office, Blanche had worked as a personal criminal defense attorney for Trump and he mistakenly described himself as still serving as Trump’s attorney during his nomination hearing last month.
Blanche has been the acting attorney general since Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi was fired in April. He had previously been confirmed as the deputy attorney general.
He could continue to serve as acting attorney general even if he is not confirmed, but the Trump administration would be blocked from appointing a replacement deputy attorney general.
Blanche has been associated with a number of controversial actions during the Trump administration, including the IRS settlement, the Justice Department’s release of files from its investigations into deceased sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein, and the prosecutions of Trump’s political enemies, including former FBI Director James Comey.
Epstein survivors and more than 1,200 former Justice Department employees are among those who have called on the Senate not to confirm Blanche.
