| Late last night, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche released a signed document purporting to end the so-called “anti-weaponization” fund that drew objections from two Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee. |
| A spokesperson for John Cornyn has said that this resolves his objection to Blanche’s nomination. Thom Tillis — who has spent more time publicly posturing than adding anything useful to this discussion — will likely fall in line. |
| As a practical matter, however, Blanche’s document is meaningless for several reasons. |
| The Justice Department can still make payouts to Jan. 6 defendants. The defendants can submit claims under the Federal Tort Claims Act, and hundreds of them already plan to do so. The department can then settle those claims outside public view and without judicial scrutiny. |
| There is only one way to prevent this from happening, and that is for Congress to pass a law preventing it from happening. |
| It’s one thing for non-lawyers to misunderstand this. It’s another thing entirely for Cornyn — a senator with decades of experience, a lawyer, a former judge, and the former Texas attorney general — to do it. At one point, Cornyn himself raised the idea of passing a law to block the payouts, but he later ruled it out for reasons that he never explained. |
| Blanche’s paperwork is also legally meaningless. The document purports to “rescind[]” an earlier order that Blanche issued concerning the operation of the fund, but the settlement agreement that kicked all of this off — the agreement that actually purported to create the fund — was executed by Trump’s personal lawyers, the Justice Department, and the IRS. |
| As Cornyn himself pointed out, the agreement states that it “may be modified only with the written agreement of the Parties,” but no one but Blanche signed it. |
| Even setting these things aside, it’s unclear why Cornyn and Tillis would accept Blanche’s representations as a resolution of this issue. |
| Trump has spent the last few days talking about how he still wants to compensate the rioters, and Blanche told the Judiciary Committee he believes that he is constitutionally obligated to follow Trump’s instructions because Trump is the president. By Blanche’s own account, Trump can at any point tell Blanche to reverse himself — publicly or privately. |
| Blanche also refused — for months — to commit to ending the fund in writing. He wouldn’t do it when other members of Congress asked, and he wouldn’t do it when a federal judge ordered him to do it. The fact that he is claiming to do it now — under duress, and even then not really — is telling in its own right. |
| This is a strange way for Cornyn and Tillis, who are both leaving the Senate when this Congress ends, to end their careers in the chamber. Trump effectively forced them both out of their jobs, and he appears to be having his way with them again. |
| If Blanche is confirmed, the two of them, along with every other Republican who votes to confirm him, will own Blanche’s legacy: the abuses of authority, the misrepresentations to the courts, the attacks on the judiciary, the endless, rank incompetence, and the politicization and hollowing out of the department. |
| Things are likely to get worse — potentially much worse — if Blanche stays at the helm. |
