Two days before Senate lawmakers were scheduled to vote on advancing Todd Blanche’s nomination to serve as attorney general, a million-dollar payout was announced for an anti-abortion activist he has called a victim of government weaponization by the Biden administration.
The settlement given to Paul Vaughn, who was convicted by a Tennessee jury in 2024 of conspiring to prevent access to an abortion clinic, shows how the goal of a $1.8 billion fund announced in May can continue, despite a public retreat by Mr. Blanche. An already existing avenue for disbursing taxpayer money could allow him to assuage skeptical Republicans while fulfilling President Trump’s desire to pay people he believes were wronged by the Justice Department.
Mr. Vaughn will receive a seven-figure settlement from the government, his lawyers said, making him among those aligned with the administration who have received a payout by an alternative means.
Since 1870, the Justice Department has handled claims for civil compensation against the federal government. Such claims can be filed through public lawsuits, or privately through forms sent directly to the department.
Mr. Vaughn, whom the president pardoned last year, has insisted he is innocent and accused the Biden administration of misusing a law meant to ensure women and health care professionals have unobstructed access to reproductive services.
The settlement was reached by his lawyers at the Thomas More Society, which often represents anti-abortion activists, in April but first disclosed on Tuesday in a statement that said their client had been prosecuted for political reasons and as part of a government weaponization effort against people who oppose abortion rights.
The continuing ability of the department to make such payouts with or without a formal fund structure is one of the sticking points between the Trump administration and Republican senators as they weigh the nomination of Mr. Blanche, currently the acting attorney general.
A single “no” from a Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee could stall or sink his nomination, and Thursday’s scheduled vote was in doubt after some crucial holdouts expressed skepticism.
In May, the Justice Department announced that it would resolve a lawsuit from Mr. Trump demanding at least $10 billion from the I.R.S. by establishing a fund intended to compensate his supporters, raising the possibility that taxpayer money could be funneled to Jan. 6 rioters. A related provision barred the I.R.S. from pursuing audits of past tax returns of Mr. Trump and his relatives.
Senator John Cornyn of Texas has voiced the loudest concerns on the committee, saying on Wednesday that he would not support the nomination of Mr. Blanche unless he provided written assurances about the end of the fund and the tax provision.
Mr. Blanche publicly defended the fund as necessary for “victims of lawfare and weaponization to be heard and seek redress.” Democrats called it a brazen slush fund meant to steer huge sums of taxpayer dollars to the president’s supporters.
Despite his public retreat, Mr. Blanche has resisted providing a written guarantee to the courts or Congress that the fund will not come back in some form.
Two weeks ago, Judge Kathleen M. Williams of Federal District Court in the Southern District of Florida, wrote that she was “extremely troubled” by Mr. Blanche’s answers to the Senate about the fund.
In testimony in May, Mr. Blanche told the senators there was “no mechanism” for a legal review of the agreement creating the fund. He argued that documents had never been submitted to a court for scrutiny because the case from which it emerged, a lawsuit Mr. Trump filed against the I.R.S. over the leak of his tax returns, had been dismissed.
“This answer is, at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous,” the judge wrote. “The court was available to review any pleading by any party at any time during this lawsuit.”
Another federal judge, Leonie M. Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia, has left alive a lawsuit seeking to dismantle the fund. She said the case remained open because Mr. Blanche and the Justice Department had refused to file an affidavit under penalty of perjury “that they will not take any action to create or operate” the payout fund and that it “will not proceed in any manner, under any name.”
Mr. Blanche has pushed back against such demands. Even as he promised lawmakers in June that the fund was dead, “I’m not committing to putting anything in writing.”
The reason for creating the fund, he also told lawmakers, “remain as important as they were before.”
The fight over the fund is the most consequential instance of Mr. Blanche’s singular management style since he became the No. 2 Justice Department official in March 2025. Far more than his predecessors, Mr. Blanche has publicly taken direct control over key decisions in politically fraught cases, often prompting criticism that he continues to act like Mr. Trump’s personal defense attorney, rather than a senior law enforcement official with responsibilities to taxpayers, the rule of law and the public.
Federal judges have repeatedly singled out Mr. Blanche by name, highlighting the direct role he has played in a wide array of what judges have cast as prosecutorial missteps. But Mr. Blanche has in some ways invited the censure by repeatedly taking on responsibility in high-profile cases that would typically have been left to his subordinates.
In May, for instance, a federal judge in Nashville put Mr. Blanche at the heart of his decision to dismiss a human smuggling case against the Salvadoran immigrant Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia as a vindictive “abuse of prosecuting power.” The judge, Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr., found that Mr. Blanche had led a “tainted investigation” and sought an indictment not because the facts and law demanded one, but rather to give the department “cover” for doing what it said it would never do: bring Mr. Abrego Garcia back to the United States from his wrongful deportation to El Salvador.
The next month, a federal judge in Minnesota also took aim at Mr. Blanche, saying that his aggressive statements about Gov. Tim Walz and other Democratic leaders had paved the way for the Justice Department to issue a raft of improper grand jury subpoenas during an investigation into whether elected officials in the state had interfered with the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
The judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, pointed out that Mr. Blanche had accused Mr. Walz and Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, of “encouraging violence against law enforcement” and vowed that he would stop their “terrorism by whatever means necessary.”
Judge Schiltz ultimately quashed the subpoenas. He ruled that they were “part of a broader campaign to coerce” officials in Minnesota to help with Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda and came at a moment when the administration had used “criminal investigations to retaliate against and pressure the president’s political and personal adversaries.”
