By Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Nandita Bose and Richard Cowan
WASHINGTON, June 2 (Reuters) – The Trump administration is abandoning the president’s nearly $1.8 billion “weaponization” fund, U.S. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told lawmakers on Tuesday, after a rare backlash from Republican senators.
“We are not moving forward with the fund,” Blanche said. “Period.”
The fund emerged from a legal settlement between President Donald Trump and the Justice Department to resolve an unprecedented $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the alleged mishandling of his tax records.
The agreement with Trump to bar future audits into his or his family’s past tax records will remain in place, Blanche told lawmakers.
The fund was dropped as furious senators faced an impasse over a $72 billion bill to fund immigration and border patrol operations.
Congressional leaders had questioned whether they could pass the bill if the fund was not killed, and a person familiar with the White House’s thinking said Blanche’s future hinged on his ability to address those concerns.
The $1.776 billion fund was meant to pay people who said they had been the subject of government abuse, and Blanche angered senators last month when he would not commit to barring people who assaulted police officers during the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot from receiving funds.
White House officials spent much of Monday calling lawmakers to assure them there would be no payouts after the Republican revolt, said two sources familiar with the matter, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
That assurance had done little to quiet Republican demands ahead of Blanche’s House subcommittee hearing Tuesday afternoon, where lawmakers pressed for a definitive promise that the fund was dead.
TRUMP CITES POST PRAISING FUND
The White House referred questions on Blanche’s comments to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
On Monday, the department said it would abide by a court order that temporarily paused the fund until June 12 but did not say what that meant for the fund permanently.
Trump broke his public silence on the fund’s future on Tuesday afternoon, posting a link to a Substack titled, “The Truth the Media Won’t Tell You About the Anti-Weaponization Fund.” The post praised Trump for giving money to those who say they have been abused by the government and criticized the media and Democrats for calling it a slush fund.
After a lunch meeting of Republican senators, Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters he spoke with Blanche earlier in the day and thought the acting attorney general would ease concerns at the House hearing.
Thune has said he wants the bill to be narrowly focused on immigration enforcement and not on Trump’s other priorities, keeping out a provision that would have allowed spending $1 billion to secure a 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the White House grounds that Trump wants.
At the Tuesday hearing, Democratic lawmakers pressed Blanche to commit to abandoning the fund in writing, which he declined to do.
(Reporting by Dan Rosenzweig-Ziff, Nandita Bose and Richard Cowan; Editing by Michael Learmonth, Andrea Ricci and Deepa Babington)
Comments