President Trump warned Sunday that the controversial anti-weaponization fund could be "back on the table" if two Republican senators continue blocking acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's confirmation, a move that would reignite a fight his own DOJ had tried to close.
Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One, Trump pinned the blame for the holdup squarely on Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both of whom sit on the Senate Judiciary Committee and have refused to advance Blanche without written guarantees from the Department of Justice. A committee vote is scheduled for Tuesday, the last window before the Senate leaves Washington for its monthlong August recess.
The threat carries real weight. The $1.776 billion fund was part of a DOJ-brokered settlement between Trump and the IRS, unveiled in May, that stemmed from the leak of Trump's tax returns. The fund was designed to compensate Americans who claim the federal government improperly targeted them in investigations. But it drew bipartisan backlash from lawmakers who believed the administration would use the money to pay defendants in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot and other Trump allies. Blanche himself has said repeatedly that plans for the fund will not move forward. Now Trump is suggesting it might.
The standoff centers on two Republicans who both say Blanche is qualified, and both refuse to vote yes. Cornyn and Tillis want written assurance that the DOJ has formally abandoned key aspects of the settlement, including the anti-weaponization fund and, as Reuters reported, broad immunity from IRS audits that the agreement extended to Trump and his associates. Cornyn called it unprecedented tax protection no other taxpayer could receive.
The senators also raised concerns about Blanche's handling of meetings with victims of Jeffrey Epstein, though the specifics of those objections remain unclear.
Cornyn expressed frustration with the pace of negotiations. AP News reported that he told reporters:
"We've been trying to help them get to a conclusion here and they won't let us. It's befuddling to me."
That frustration runs in both directions. Trump sees something more personal behind the resistance, and he said so on Air Force One.
Trump made no effort to hide his theory. Cornyn lost his primary election to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom Trump endorsed. The president framed the confirmation blockade as a grudge, not a policy dispute.
A post from the White House rapid-response account on August 2 carried Trump's full remarks:
"We have a man named Todd Blanche. He's outstanding in every way... You're not going to find a better person, and everybody agrees. It's because I backed Cornyn's opponent and his opponent won in a landslide. That's the only reason it's happening."
Whether or not the motive is personal, the effect is real. Blanche has served as acting attorney general since Trump fired Pam Bondi in April. Before that, he was Trump's personal defense attorney from April 2023 through January 2025. His nomination should have been a formality. Instead, two outgoing senators, Tillis announced last summer he would not seek a third term, and Cornyn lost his primary, hold the keys to the Justice Department's leadership heading into a critical stretch.
That dynamic mirrors a broader pattern in Republican politics, where Trump-backed candidates and establishment incumbents continue to jostle for control of the party's direction.
Last week, Trump floated a workaround: renominating Blanche next year, once Tillis and Cornyn have left office and can no longer block the vote. But the anti-weaponization fund threat is a sharper instrument, one that puts pressure on holdouts by raising the stakes of inaction.
Trump defended the fund on Sunday in personal terms, pointing to people he said were destroyed by politically motivated federal investigations. He cited 22 suicides, a figure he attributed to targets of the Biden administration's enforcement actions, and compared their treatment to some of the worst targeting of any group in American history.
"People were hurt so badly, 22 suicides, they were destroyed, their families were destroyed. There's never been an attack on any group of people in this country, in my opinion, maybe one, maybe there's one group that was attacked violently and viciously, like these people were attacked. And this would be a reimbursement for the pain that they suffered."
The 22-suicides claim is Trump's own; no independent verification of that number appears in any available reporting. But the broader argument, that federal agencies were used as political weapons under the prior administration, is one Trump has made consistently and one that resonates with millions of Americans who watched the IRS, the FBI, and the DOJ pursue cases that looked more like political operations than law enforcement.
Democrats, meanwhile, have taken a different approach to the Trump family's finances. Rep. Robert Garcia has pledged to make Trump family finances a top target if Democrats retake the House, a reminder that the appetite for weaponized investigations has not diminished on the left.
The settlement that created the fund also included provisions dropping tax claims against Trump. Fox News reported that the DOJ missed a 4 p.m. Wednesday deadline to provide the written proposals Cornyn and Tillis demanded, prompting Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to postpone the confirmation hearing. Cornyn told reporters the actual settlement document needed to be conformed to what Blanche testified under oath.
The Trump DOJ has moved aggressively on other fronts, including sweeping updates to federal religious liberty protections, but the department's leadership vacuum remains its most visible problem.
The committee vote rescheduled for Tuesday at 9 a.m. could resolve the standoff. Just The News reported that both Cornyn and Tillis ultimately confirmed plans to back Blanche, suggesting the president successfully navigated the resistance. If that holds, Blanche would advance to a full Senate vote before the August recess begins.
A New York Post report noted the committee had canceled the original vote less than 24 hours before it was scheduled, underscoring how close the nomination came to slipping past the recess deadline entirely. The Senate departs Washington on August 7.
Trump himself struck a confident tone, telling reporters that "a lot of big supporters of Trump" favor the fund. But his willingness to revive it also served a tactical purpose: it reminded Cornyn and Tillis that blocking Blanche does not eliminate the policies they object to. It may accelerate them.
The broader fight over January 6 and its legal aftermath continues to shape Washington's political landscape, and the anti-weaponization fund sits at the intersection of all of it, executive power, congressional oversight, and the question of whether the federal government will ever be held accountable for targeting its own citizens.
Two senators who are already on their way out of office held up the president's attorney general pick for weeks. If the result is that the very fund they opposed comes roaring back, they will have no one to blame but themselves.