Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Sunday that the Justice Department had reached an agreement with the two GOP holdouts standing between him and confirmation, and signed an order formally rescinding Trump’s $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
The deal came together just a day after Trump himself had threatened to revive the fund if the senators didn’t relent.
The order, dated August 2, states that the May 18 order creating the fund “is rescinded and shall have no force or effect.” It goes further than Blanche’s past verbal assurances, spelling out that the fund never appointed commissioners, transferred funds or paid out claims, and names several pending lawsuits over the fund as effectively moot as a result.
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Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina had refused to accept Blanche’s repeated public statements that the fund was dead without something in writing. Blanche wrote on X that his team had “addressed any concerns or outstanding questions” after weeks of meetings with committee members and senators.
Read: Two GOP Holdouts Postpone Blanche’s Path To Attorney General
The order also narrows a separate provision from a May 19 order that had granted a broader “mutual release of claims” tied to what the settlement called “Lawfare and/or Weaponization.” Blanche’s new order says that release applies only retroactively and only to the parties actually named in the specific lawsuit it references, formally incorporating his own July 15 Senate testimony on the settlement’s scope.
The fund traced back to a settlement DOJ struck with Trump in May, dropping his $10 billion lawsuit over leaked tax records in exchange for creating it and shielding Trump and his family from IRS audits on returns filed before the deal.
A federal judge in Florida voided that underlying settlement entirely in July, ruling it looked more like a fraud on the court than genuine adversarial litigation. Trump is appealing that decision, and it remains separate from Sunday’s rescission
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Cornyn’s office confirmed the agreement Sunday night; Tillis had not yet commented. The Senate Judiciary Committee plans to vote at 9 a.m. Tuesday on whether to advance Blanche’s nomination to the full Senate.
