Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order late Sunday rescinding the $1.8 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund," the payout mechanism the Justice Department created by an order dated May 18 to implement a settlement of President Trump's lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury over leaked tax records [1][2].
The order's own language leaves no room for reading it narrowly on that point. "This order establishes, beyond any doubt, that there is no Fund," it states [1].
What that sentence covers is the fund, and only the fund. The rescission reaches the May 18 implementation order, which built the machinery: the commissioners who would have run the payouts, the claims process, the transfer of money. It does not reach the settlement underneath, which included the promise of an apology to Trump and his sons along with an obligation to create a fund. That settlement remains as written [1]. The department's order also states that the machinery was never switched on, that no commissioners were ever appointed, that no money was ever transferred into the fund and that no claims process was ever created [1]. Anyone reading the rescission as the end of the government's obligations here is reading it wrong. The commitment survives its implementation.
The reason the order exists is a nomination. Sens. John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina refused to advance Blanche's nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee without written confirmation that the fund was dead, citing bipartisan concern that Jan. 6 rioters could end up compensated from it [2]. The committee had already postponed a vote scheduled for Thursday [2].
Both senators treated the signed order as the thing they had asked for. "We want to express our gratitude to Mr. Blanche and his staff for working with us on this," they said in a joint statement [2]. Cornyn put it more loosely on his own: "I think as far as Blanche and the Department of Justice, we were pretty much on the same page" [2].
On timing, the two senators now say they will vote to advance the nomination on Aug. 6, a date reported by one fetched source that we have not cross-confirmed with a second [2].
The shape of the episode is worth stating plainly. A $1.8 billion federal payout program was stood up by a departmental order in May and taken down by a departmental order in August, with no legislation and no vote in either direction. The instrument that forced the reversal was not oversight, a hearing or a subpoena. It was two senators from the president's party declining to move a nomination out of committee, and it worked on a timescale that ordinary oversight does not reach. That leverage is now spent, and the underlying obligation it was aimed at is still on the books.
