Cornyn and Tillis Drop Their Blockade of Todd Blanche After the DOJ Formally Kills the $1.8 Billion Fund

The two Republican senators who spent weeks stalling Todd Blanche's confirmation as attorney general said Monday they will vote for him, after the Justice Department formally killed the $1.8 billion fund at the center of the standoff.

Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina announced their support after the department issued an order Sunday rescinding the so-called anti-weaponization fund. The senators also extracted a second concession in writing: that a tax-immunity provision covers only the parties to the original lawsuit and the named defendants — the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department — and reaches no further than that.

"I think Todd Blanche did what we asked him to do," Cornyn said of the arrangement. "It binds not only him but the Department of Justice as a whole, and so I think that satisfies my demands." The phrasing matters: the senators' objection all along was that a promise from one nominee would evaporate the moment he left office, and they pushed for language that binds the institution rather than the man.

The fund grew out of President Trump's settlement with the IRS over the leak of his tax returns. Critics inside and outside the Senate warned that the money, structured as compensation for people the government had improperly targeted, could end up flowing to people convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol — a prospect that turned a technical settlement into a political liability for Blanche, who served as Trump's personal defense lawyer before joining the department.

The fight had escalated well past ordinary confirmation friction. The Senate Judiciary Committee scrapped a scheduled vote on the nomination late last month, and Trump publicly threatened to pull Blanche's name until the two senators fell into line. Blanche has been running the department as acting attorney general throughout, an arrangement neither party wanted to see stretch through the fall.

With Cornyn and Tillis on board, the Judiciary Committee is scheduled to meet Tuesday to advance the nomination to the full Senate, where Republicans can afford only a narrow number of defections. Democrats are expected to oppose him nearly unanimously, but the math now favors confirmation.

One question the order does not settle is whether convicted Jan. 6 rioters can still seek taxpayer money by another route. The document rescinding the fund does not explicitly bar restitution to people convicted in the Capitol attack, and a separate class action brought by Jan. 6 defendants is still live in federal court, where the department moved Monday to have it thrown out on statute-of-limitations grounds.