Cornyn Cuts Deal to Kill $1.8 Billion DOJ Settlement Fund, Clears Path for Blanche Confirmation Vote

Senator John Cornyn, R-Texas, struck a deal late Sunday with the Department of Justice that clears the way for Todd Blanche's confirmation as attorney general, according to the Texas Tribune. The agreement scraps a $1.8 billion fund the DOJ had set up for people claiming to be victims of "lawfare," and narrows a related tax-audit immunity deal that had extended protection to President Trump, his family and his business associates.

Cornyn had blocked Blanche's nomination for days, demanding written confirmation that the fund was actually dead, not just verbally disavowed in testimony. North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis joined him, and together the two Republicans forced the Senate Judiciary Committee to delay a planned vote last week. Since the committee cannot afford any GOP defections, that two-man holdout mattered.

The fund itself traces back to a settlement resolving a lawsuit Trump filed over the leak of his tax returns. As part of that deal, Trump, his family, and his business associates were also shielded from tax audits. Cornyn wanted it in writing that the audit shield applied narrowly, only to the plaintiffs in that specific case and the IRS, not as a broader carve-out.

Blanche, currently acting attorney general and Trump's former personal defense lawyer, signed a written order late Sunday night rescinding the fund and spelling out the audit deal's limits. Cornyn spokesperson Natalie Yezbick confirmed the agreement Monday, and Cornyn said he'll vote to advance Blanche out of committee Tuesday.

Cornyn maintained his objections were about the substance of the settlement, not personal politics, and said the concern was shared by other Senate Republicans. Two sitting GOP senators, one of them retiring and with nothing left to lose politically, held up a president's own nominee over a fund they viewed as improper.

Trump saw it differently. He speculated publicly that Cornyn's holdup was payback for Trump's endorsement of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton over Cornyn in the May primary runoff, a race Cornyn lost. Trump also defended the fund itself and talked about reviving it through legislation, which, according to the Texas Tribune, is exactly what hardened Cornyn's insistence on getting the kill order in writing rather than trusting a verbal promise.

Other DOJ fires burning at the same time

The Blanche standoff wasn't the only DOJ story raising eyebrows. The department dropped its criminal case against former Olympian David Hearn over alleged damage to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. In a Friday filing, the DOJ acknowledged the damage was actually caused by flawed installation work from a contractor, not vandalism, contradicting weeks of the administration's own public narrative.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum tried to hold the vandalism line anyway, writing on X Saturday that "the evidence is clear, vandals have repeatedly caused damage to the Reflecting Pool," some of it "caught on camera." Trump split the difference in a Truth Social post the same day, conceding there "may have been some contractor difficulty" but insisting "the major damage was caused by VANDALS!" He also said he disagreed "100%" with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro's decision to drop the case.

Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner, on his Justice Matters podcast, called the sequence backwards: indicting first and investigating later, then blaming the Interior Department for bad information the DOJ apparently never verified. Whether that reflects a systemic problem with how this DOJ builds cases, or a one-off failure in a single prosecution, is a fair question that the dropped charges alone don't answer.

Separately, lawyers for former FBI Director James Comey told a court that Secret Service agents who interviewed him over a beach photo showing seashells arranged to read "86 47" were directed to relay details of that interview to Trump while he was aboard Air Force One, with Trump described as "very interested," according to Geo News. If accurate, that's a president being briefed in real time on an active law enforcement interview involving a private citizen and former federal official. No charges have been filed in that matter, and the White House has not commented on the specific allegation.

None of these three threads—the Blanche fund fight, the Reflecting Pool case collapse, or the Comey interview disclosure—has produced an indictment, sanction, or formal misconduct finding against Trump personally. But together they've pushed a bipartisan pair of senators to demand written guardrails from their own party's DOJ. The Judiciary Committee vote Tuesday will be the first concrete marker of whether that pressure changes anything beyond one nominee's paperwork.