While acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is trying to shore up support for his flagging nomination to drop the “acting” from his title, he’s also busy shoveling your taxpayer dollars out the door for the poor victims of weaponization by the Department of Justice.
On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that you just gave seven figures to Paul Vaughn, an anti-choice activist who was convicted by a jury in 2024 for conspiring to block access to an abortion clinic, which is an actual law that he broke, even though it is one that Trump doesn’t believe should exist.
The whole move highlights that President Donald Trump doesn’t really need his treasonweasel slush fund to pay off his supporters. He can do it by these sorts of sham settlements with a friendly litigant, which is also how you have given seven figures to Michael Flynn and the family of Capitol insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt. The DOJ can also make payouts via the Federal Tort Claims Act, which is what Trump tried to use to say he was owed $230 million for the extreme pain and suffering of being investigated for his myriad open and obvious crimes.
The government has always been able to pay out FTCA claims and, of course, make settlements. However, no one ever really thought we’d have a DOJ or a president who just decided that their job wasn’t to be good stewards of government funds but instead to simply pay off their pals.
So, why does Vaughn get all this dough?
You see, justice was weaponized against Vaughn because he was persecuted by his government for opposing abortion rights. But he wasn’t persecuted. He was duly charged, prosecuted, and convicted for openly violating a law specifically on the books to protect access to reproductive healthcare.
Trump pardoned Vaughn, along with nearly two dozen other anti-choice activists, right at the start of his second term, wiping away his conviction because, per Trump, they shouldn’t have been prosecuted for breaking a law he doesn’t think should be a law.
Fun fact: Vaughn was convicted under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which is meant for just this. But to get the act passed back in 1994 required tacking on protections for churches in a law meant to protect abortion clinics, because sure, whatever. So this is what Trump is now using to prosecute people in Saint Paul, Minnesota, who protested at Cities Church—where a top local ICE official is a pastor—during Operation Metro Surge.
It’s impossible not to feel that this brazen cash drop on Vaughn was cynically intended to be a weaponization payout that GOP senators who are wobbly about the weaponization fund itself wouldn’t be bothered by, because it is slathering their fave anti-choice hardliners with cash.
But Blanche’s nomination is flagging nonetheless, because it is clear he is in no way allowed, by his real and only boss and client, Donald Trump, to formally say that the slush fund is dead. He won’t put it in writing. He won’t file an affidavit with the court, and now even some GOP senators have the yips about that.
So, the Senate panel that was supposed to vote on his nomination on Thursday scrapped the vote because, well, Blanche doesn’t have the votes. Both Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis want to limit Trump’s audit immunity.
You remember the audit immunity, right? It’s the side deal giveaway to Trump that is supposed to be some sort of order issued by Blanche as part of the slush fund “settlement,” and somehow, that has survived the end of the fund, because laws and words no longer have meaning.
Cornyn and Tillis want Blanche to agree to limit the audit immunity deal to existing audits, meaning Trump and family and Trump companies would not be protected from future investigations, but Blanche won’t sign on.
Big bold stance there, guys. Protecting the president from existing audits is just as illegal and scummy as potential future ones, but hey, if this is what tanks Todd, we’ll take it.
Published with permission of Daily Kos
