Trump's $1.8B slush fund for criminals may be dead—for now

Multiple news agencies are reporting that senior administration officials have told them that Donald Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6th seditionists and other felonious allies is, for now, dead.

But this is the Trump administration we're dealing with, the same one that declares the Iran war over every Friday and on again by the next Monday, so any reports of the fund's permanent demise should be taken with more than a few grains of salt.

A senior White House official told MS NOW’s Jacqueline Alemany on Monday that the White House is dropping its plan for the fund.

Axios was first to report on the White House’s intentions.

The developments come three days after a federal judge blocked the gambit from advancing, as part of a preliminary move.

A Justice Department spokesperson appears to have leaned into Friday’s court ruling, expressing the DOJ’s disagreement with the outcome in a statement to MS NOW, but concluding that it “will abide by the Court’s ruling.” The same statement also referred to the fund in the past tense.

The immediate reason the slush fund is on hold is not that court ruling, but a meeting between Republican senators and new acting attorney general Todd Blanche that happened a week and a half ago. At least half the caucus reportedly teamed up to read Blanche the riot act, after which Majority Leader John Thune sent the Senate on vacation until June rather than vote on a planned bill to fund the Department of Homeland Security.

Multiple Republican senators threatened to torpedo that bill if it didn't include language specifically limiting how the slush fund would be used and which Trump-allied felons would be getting money from it, and Blanche wasn't willing to offer any such stipulations so here we are.

Now that it's June, the Senate has to pick up where they left off last month. But there's been no offers from the White House to rein in the obvious crookedness of the slush fund, and Republicans didn't come back from their vacations with new stories of constituents telling them that it was very, very important that the insurrectionist rioters who attacked Capitol police in their attempts to "hang Mike Pence" get a fat paycheck in exchange, so here we are.

For now, the White House is backing down. We appear to have found the exact threshold of corruption that would cause a handful of Republican senators to bow out, and it turns out to be "try to steal nearly $2 billion to hand out to Trump-allied felons." Hooray? I guess?

Reading between the lines, we can infer a few things. First off, it appears Todd Blanche had to scramble a bit to find a scapegoat: The Department of Justice statement is written to suggest that it's a temporary court order prohibiting the department from going forward with the fund that's to blame for the failure, completely ignoring the "Todd Blanche got his ass handed to him in an all-Republican senate briefing and then the Senate left the city rather than deal with that crap" part.

That's to be expected. Blanche has to sweatily explain his failure to his even sweatier Dear Leader, and the most important sycophant's rule when dealing with an abusive narcissistic tantruming boss is to claim that whatever's gone wrong was somebody else's fault.

Second, Axios' reporting only quote a source as saying the fund is dead "for now," which suggests that White House crooks haven't given up on their plan to give cash rewards to Trump-allied felons. But they do recognize that the way they first went about it turns out to be too crooked for even the crookedest Congress in U.S. history to abide, so they'll likely now look for quieter ways to do the same.

It's especially notable that Todd Blanche was apparently unwilling or unable to make even the one must-have concession that Sen. Susan Collins and others were agitating for: A prohibition on any of the funds going to Jan. 6 rioters who attacked police officers.

We've been assuming that the slush fund was mainly a way for Trump to direct taxpayer funds to influential lawyer allies like Rudy Giuliani, people who have been disbarred or faced other significant consequences for spreading the provably false election hoaxes Trump used to justify the insurrection. If Blanche couldn't offer senators a negotiated clause that cut violent rioters out of the funds, though, that suggests that the White House specifically wanted payouts to those attackers, not just Trump's top-tier cronies.

On the other hand, we already know that Donald Trump doesn't give a damn about anyone but himself, so he may not push terribly hard for the slush fund when he's still getting what he, personally most wants from the fake "settlement": a promise from his crooked Justice Department appointees that the IRS will be prohibited from auditing any of his prior tax returns, forever, nor those of anyone in his family or anyone he's in a business relationship with.

That get-out-of-jail-free card is reportedly worth at least $100 million in disputed back taxes. And it's also shamelessly corrupt, of course, and will likely also be the subject of court challenges as judges try to hash out whether a president can effectively order his own underlings to give him special financial perks.

I'll tell you who's breathing a huge sigh of relief, though: Senate Republicans. This has been the most significant revolt against Trump's corruption since his second term began, and Republican senators are going to be very happy to sweep the whole thing aside and pretend it never happened. Constituents were expecting them to show some minor scrap of dignity—or at least expecting them to not openly endorse President Crimeguy's most blatant theft yet—and being able to squeak out of it at the last minute is probably the best news any of them could have hoped for.