While Trump says ‘anti-weaponization fund’ isn’t dead, GOP lawmakers are silent on if it should die

By Brentin Mock

WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 12: U.S. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) asks questions during a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on the FY2027 budget request in the Dirksen Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill on May 12, 2026 in Washington, DC. The Trump administration is asking for an unprecedented $1.5 trillion for the Pentagon, an increase of 50-percent over last year's budget. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Republican leaders refused to say on Sunday’s news shows that President Donald Trump’s controversial “anti-weaponization fund” is dead, or whether it even should be.

Trump recently made several social media posts threatening to revive the suspended $1.8 billion fund, in response to the U.S. Senate failing to confirm his former personal lawyer Todd Blanche as U.S. Attorney General. In one post, Trump referred to the fund as the “Anti-Weaponization Bill,” which has led some to speculate that he may try to have Congress authorize it as legislation. 

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) did not reject this idea, when asked on Meet the Press if he would support such legislation, saying he’d “have to read it first” before deciding. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) also refused to disown it when asked a similar question on CNN’s State of the Union about whether it was even a good idea. 

Trump has been pressuring Congress to confirm Blanche, who has been a willing accomplice in the president’s agenda to usurp states’ authority over elections. Blanche has also threatened to criminally prosecute local election officials for not complying with Trump’s unprecedented and unlawful demands for private voter files.

Among the senators who’ve been unwilling to confirm Blanche is Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who said this weekend that he’s voting no because of Trump’s escalation of the anti-weaponization fund talk.

“Despite comments as late as yesterday that the fund is dead, President Trump clearly intends to resurrect the payout pot for punks either by inappropriately establishing another bogus fund or pushing Congress to vote for a bill that the majority of Republicans in the Senate would be against,” wrote Tillis in a social media post on Saturday.

Before that, Tillis indicated that he and Blanche had been working on a way to “formally end” the fund, but that this had been torpedoed by Trump’s posts about restoring it.

The fund was announced earlier this year as part of a settlement between Trump and the IRS, set up to compensate those who purportedly were attacked by the Biden administration. 

Critics from both parties have raised concerns that Trump would use it to financially reward the rioters who ransacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. A federal judge stopped the fund from taking shape in May, while another judge opened a probe into whether it was set up under fraudulent terms.

On Friday, the Trump administration appealed the ruling that paused the fund from implementation.

Meanwhile, Blanche himself has said the fund was no longer happening when grilled during confirmation hearings, despite Friday’s appeal.

However, comments Trump made during a recent press conference and on his Truth Social page have led some to believe that he hopes to restore it, but as law. 

“In terms of the weaponization fund, the president himself has conceded that it will take legislation, and I’m glad he conceded that,” said Sen. Kennedy on Meet the Press. “We’ll get to shape the bill.”

Asked on CNN’s State of the Union if the fund was dead, Rep. Jordan would only say, “Well, Todd Blanche under oath said it was dead.”

But he wouldn’t rebuke Trump’s recent comments about reviving it. 

“I think what Trump 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 renominate Todd Blanch after the election,” Rep. Jordan told CNN’s Dana Bash. “If that’s what the president wants to do, that’s fine.”

However, when Bash asked if the fund was “a good idea,” Jordan still wouldn’t reject it. Instead, he compared it to other people who’d been compensated after saying they felt attacked by the federal government.

“It’s no different than what Merrick Garland did with Peter Strzok and Lisa Page,” said Jordan about the FBI agents who received court settlements in 2024 under Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland in their lawsuits against the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ). “I’m saying there’s a fund right now that compensates people who’ve been wronged.”

It’s not clear what fund Jordan was referring to. Strzok and Page were not awarded money from any fund set up for political attacks from the federal government. The $1.2 million Strzok received and the $800,000 that Page received were settlements from their lawsuits against the Justice Department, under federal privacy laws. They accused the DOJ of leaking their private text messages to the press in 2017.

Also, that would not be the same as Trump’s anti-weaponization fund, which was set up to compensate alleged victims of the Joe Biden administration.

While Strzok’s and Page’s settlements came under Biden, their lawsuits were against the Trump administration. Strzok argued in his lawsuit that Trump’s DOJ not only leaked his texts, but also fired him because of his role in the FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign’s alleged links to Russia in 2016.

Trump confirmed in recent comments that the fund is specifically targeted at Biden and former President Barack Obama. 

During a recent press conference, Trump said about those allegedly victimized by those administrations that he’d “like to see them compensated for the pain.”

“The way they were treated,” said Trump, “the Biden administration and the Obama administration weaponized the government and destroyed lives.”

While Kennedy wouldn’t reject the fund on Meet the Press, he did acknowledge that there is already a mechanism for people to sue the government if they felt it wrongly harmed them.

“We already have an anti-weaponization fund, a pool of money that you can access if you’re abused by the government, through the Federal Tort Claims Act,” said Kennedy. “But if he wants to improve it, I’m going to look at it. But I’m not going to give him a blank check.”