The top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee was evasive under questioning about Donald Trump’s “weaponization fund” on Sunday after the president made clear he plans to revive the concept.
Rep. Jim Jordan appeared on CNN’s State of the Union and was questioned about why Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Congress that the fund was “dead” when Donald Trump, on Saturday, wrote on Truth Social that he would “push hard” for Congress to pass funding for a planned $1.776 billion fund aimed at awarding payouts to people prosecuted by the Department of Justice under Joe Biden.
Jordan claimed that Trump was merely speaking about what he’d do if Blanche were not confirmed as attorney general on a permanent basis — and refused to explain why Blanche had told Congress otherwise if the president was still eyeing the fund as a possibility.
“You’re the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. So is it dead, or is it not?” CNN’s Dana Bash asked Jordan on Sunday.
“Well, Todd Blanche under oath said it was dead. Todd Blanche needs to be confirmed,” said Jordan, who called Blanche an “outstanding” pick for attorney general.
“Even Sen. [Thom] Tillis and Sen. [John] Cornyn have said that he’s highly qualified because he’s doing an out– bringing down crime, going after the fraudsters who’ve been ripping off American tax dollars. Todd’s doing a great job, and he needs to be confirmed,” said Jordan.
“Yeah, you’re right that these two senators say that this is unfortunate that this is happening to Todd Blanche,” Bash replied. “On the weaponization fund, are you saying … that the president is not accurate? Or he’s not telling the truth when he said, just this weekend, that it’s still viable?”
“Well I think what the president said, Dana, I think what he said was in the context of, ‘if they’re not going to confirm Todd Blanche’, then he’s going to pull it back and then he’s going to nominate Todd Blanche after the election,” claimed Jordan.
The Ohio Republican was then pressed by Bash on whether he thought the fund was a good idea, and Jordan implied that he did: he spoke at length about how it could be used to reward conservative activists who were allegedly mistreated by the Biden Justice Department, and also compared it to a settlement that Peter Strzok, a member of Robert Mueller’s team investigating Donald Trump over the 2016 election, reached with the Biden Justice Department for more than $1 million.
Jordan’s apparent support for the fund puts him at odds with a large segment of the Senate Republican caucus, which views the planned fund as a corrupt enterprise aimed at rewarding Donald Trump’s political allies as well as violent rioters who were convicted of crimes related to the attack on Congress on January 6. Some Republicans in both chambers have openly derided it as a “slush fund” for MAGA figures.
Republicans in the Senate have come out in large numbers opposed to the fund, and any attempt by the president to get members of his party on board has utterly failed — any bill providing funding for the account, as it stands, would almost certainly be defeated in the Senate.
Still, the president is miffed over two holdout Republican senators, Tillis and Cornyn, who are refusing to back Blanche’s nomination until the Department of Justice puts it in writing that the fund will not be established. In comments to The Independent and other outlets, the senators maintained prior to Trump’s outburst on Saturday that the president planned to resurrect the fund.
Elsewhere on Sunday Sen. John Kennedy, another Republican typically aligned with Senate GOP leadership, said that he would not provide a “blank check” for Trump’s proposed fund and added that he would not support any such funding going to January 6 participants.
“If somebody thinks they were abused by the federal government when they were punished, by attacking the Capitol in a riot that got totally out of control, right now they have the right to file a Federal Tort Claims Act against the federal government, and a federal judge will decide,” said Kennedy on NBC’s Meet the Press. “And I would take that issue completely off the table.”
