Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told members of Congress Tuesday that the Trump administration's controversial $1.776 billion anti-weaponization fund has been scrapped.
"We are not moving forward with the fund, period," he told the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies. He was speaking before the panel to discuss the DOJ's budget.
His remarks comes just days after a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia temporarily blocked the creation of the anti-weaponization fund after a lawsuit from Democracy Forward and others.
On Monday, the Justice Department issued a statement saying it would abide by that federal court ruling while the legal challenge played out in court. But that didn't rule out the possibility the DOJ would restart the fund after the temporary ban was lifted. Now, Blanche has made it official: The fund is done.
The Trump administration had said the fund would be available to those who alleged the federal government had been weaponized against them, a refrain popularized by some Trump supporters particularly during the Biden administration.
The fund was to be created as part of a settlement between President Trump and his own Justice Department as a result of a $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed against the IRS for his previously leaked tax returns.
Democratic lawmakers had called it a "slush fund" for Trump supporters, and even some Republican lawmakers were reluctant to support it. Political pressure on the administration to pull the plug on the fund was mounting as it had derailed Republicans' plans to push through a party-line bill to fund immigration enforcement for the rest of Trump's time in the White House.
Notably, Blanche said the DOJ will uphold the rest of the settlement — which includes provisions that shielded Trump, his family and his companies from any tax audits or enforcement for prior tax returns, and Blanche said those provisions would remain.
Scrutiny into the settlement continues as a judge in Florida who oversaw Trump's initial lawsuit against the IRS is also weighing whether to reopen that matter after the government announced a settlement and both parties said they were dropping the case.
That judge, Kathleen Williams of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, had questioned whether the case was legitimate because the president was on both sides of the dispute. Williams, an Obama administration appointee, said Friday she wanted to weigh whether the case amounted to deception and the court was itself "the victim of a fraud." She gave Trump's lawyers until June 12 to respond.
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