Democrats Investigate Todd Blanche as DOJ Launches Slush Fund

As the Department of Justice launches a $1.776 billion fund to pay damages to the president and his allies, Democrats in Congress are launching an investigation into the man overseeing the whole thing: acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.

Senators Adam Schiff, Dick Durbin, and Richard Blumenthal want to know whether Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal defense attorney, has recused himself from President Trump’s personal civil lawsuits against the government.

“Since last year, the Department has systematically dismantled the agency’s internal guardrails, gutting both the career ethics staff and the Office of Professional Responsibility, and has refused to provide any answers to Congress about these egregious actions,” the senators wrote in a letter to Assistant Attorney General for Administration Jolene Lauria.

The letter contains 10 questions about whether Blanche has recused himself from Trump’s cases, as well as whether he has received ethics advice about his past representation of Trump in personal matters. The senators are also asking, “What is the last date that Mr. Blanche provided personal legal advice to Donald Trump or served as his personal attorney?”

The letter cites CNN’s report last week that Blanche was told in March 2025, after he joined the DOJ, that he had to recuse himself from Trump’s personal cases against the government by Joseph Tirrell, the top ethics lawyer in the department.

“Recent public reporting revealed that in March 2025, less than two weeks after assuming the role of Deputy Attorney General, Mr. Blanche was explicitly and formally advised by the Department’s top career ethics lawyer that his recusal from legal cases involving President Trump in his personal capacity was necessary,” the letter said.

A DOJ spokesperson told CNN that Blanche “is recused from many cases before DOJ. In any cases that are still ongoing where he previously represented someone, he is recused.”

“To the extent DOJ is investigating something related to the President for which Todd was previously representing him, then hypothetically yes, he would recuse,” the spokesperson said, but added that this remains a “hypothetical.”

That’s not particularly reassuring, considering that Trump now has a slush fund to compensate his supporters whom he thinks were unfairly punished, and this could include anyone from January 6 insurrectionists to election deniers. On top of that, Tirrell was fired in July, and he’s currently suing the DOJ. Are ethics no longer a concern at the DOJ?

The Senate parliamentarian is a nonpartisan referee for the legislative branch, a role that has quietly existed for almost a century. So of course Donald Trump is mad at the current one.

Trump pressured Senate Majority Leader John Thune in a private phone call Monday to fire Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, according to reporting by Semafor and NOTUS. Two days earlier, MacDonough ruled against Senate Republicans allocating $1 billion for the president’s ballroom project in their budget reconciliation bill.

Despite Trump claiming for months that his ballroom would be entirely funded through donations, his cronies in the Senate have tried to sneak in an extra billion for “securing” the space (which is not even built yet). The proposed reconciliation bill also funds the Department of Homeland Security through 2028.

MacDonough, the first woman to be appointed parliamentarian, has served in the role since 2012. One of her jobs is to review all reconciliation bills and cut provisions the Senate cannot make a good case for. While her cuts aren’t technically binding and can be overruled with a majority vote, ignoring her would be a huge break from precedent—and we all know the Senate loves precedent.

Thune was dismissive of the idea of firing MacDonough, according to NOTUS.

“No,” the majority leader told NOTUS when asked if he would consider the idea. “We’re going through a process that we go through every time we have a reconciliation bill and the people on both sides are mad at the parliamentarian. That’s been true.” Thune also let things slide in 2025 when Trump moaned to him about MacDonough’s rulings on Medicaid provisions.

The phone call represents yet another attempt to influence the legislative branch from our current commander in chief, who routinely decries people and policies that don’t benefit him on social media.

Republicans are not expected to take out this “security” allotment but instead adjust the clause’s language and potentially ask for less money. If MacDonough clears the new version, the bill could go to the Senate floor for a vote in the next few weeks.

Just one lone Republican has spoken out against President Trump’s corrupt “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”

Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy—who was just defeated in a primary against Trump-endorsed Representative Julia Letlow and state Treasurer John Fleming—sounded off in opposition to the slush fund.

“We are a nation of laws; you can’t just make up things.… It is as if somebody sued themselves and agreed upon a settlement with themselves that’s going to be funded by the rest of us,” Cassidy told NBC’s Sahil Kapur Monday night. “Now if that’s the case, what? Wait a second! I just came off the campaign trail. People are concerned about making their own ends meet, not about putting the slush fund together without a legal precedent.”

Cassidy’s right. Trump created the slush fund as part of a settlement after suing his own IRS, setting aside nearly $1.8 billion of taxpayer money for anyone who felt unfairly targeted by the Biden administration— from January 6 rioters to right-wing think tanks, to the president’s own super PAC. The fund’s guidelines also note that once a recipient has received their money, the Trump administration has “no liability whatsoever for the protection or safeguarding of those funds, regardless of bank failure, fraudulent transfers, or any other fraud or misuse of the funds.”

While the Republicans maintain their complete radio silence on the president’s self-enrichment scheme, Democratic senators have launched a separate probe into Assistant Attorney General Todd Blanche and whether he’s actually recused himself from the president’s personal legal matters given that he used to be Trump’s personal lawyer.

Bari Weiss might soon be forced to hand over the reins to CBS News.

As Paramount closes in on its potential deal with Warner Bros. Discovery, executives at the networks are considering avenues to remove Weiss from her position overseeing CBS News.

The top brass is reportedly having informal discussions about changing Weiss’s mandate, particularly as the groups look ahead to a potential merger with CNN. Instead, they would bring in a new, more experienced executive to run the department, giving Weiss “less control over the linear product,” reported Puck News Monday.

It’s unclear how formal the talks to reorient Weiss have been, but she would likely lose day-to-day control over several major CBS properties, including Evening News, CBS Mornings, and 60 Minutes. Weiss would maintain broad editorial influence but would largely be shifted to oversee the news division’s digital growth.

A spokesman for Paramount told Puck that “Bari has the full support of Paramount and David Ellison as the editorial leader overseeing CBS News and 60 Minutes. Reports suggesting otherwise are inaccurate.”

Weiss, the founder of the pro-Israel blog The Free Press and a former New York Times opinion columnist, was tapped as the newsroom’s newest chief late last year, despite the fact that she had never worked in broadcast, lacked traditional reporting experience, and had also never run a major news operation.

Her tenure has so far lasted seven months, but her business decisions atop the news giant have unequivocally and single-handedly divorced CBS News from its decades-long place within America’s prestige news media circuit.

What was once crowned the “gold standard” of broadcasting, and the home of some of journalism’s most venerable names, such as Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow, has since devolved into a graveyard for journalism ethics.

Under Weiss’s stewardship, CBS News has killed critical stories in order to save face for the Trump administration. In December, Weiss pulled the plug on a 60 Minutes segment investigating the result of Donald Trump’s mass deportation program, focusing on Venezuelan immigrants who had been deported to El Salvador’s notoriously brutal CECOT mega-prison.

The network has also lost a cadre of veteran journalists, whom Weiss replaced with the likes of Peter Attia—who was ousted from his role as an on-air contributor shortly after his hiring was announced due to his various ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Yet Weiss’s appointment was merely the cherry on top of a large portion of recent chaos at CBS. In the last year, parent company Paramount undermined itself by settling multimillion-dollar lawsuits with Trump over CBS’s fair and accurate coverage (in an apparent bid to butter up the administration ahead of a multibillion-dollar merger with SkyDance). That resulted in the loss of two storied showrunners, including 60 Minutes producer Bill Owens and CBS News chief Wendy McMahon, who rejected Paramount’s approach to handling the groundless lawsuit.

While meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week, President Trump suggested that China, the U.S., and Russia work together to fight the International Criminal Court.

The Financial Times reports, citing unnamed sources, that Trump himself raised the idea. The White House didn’t mention the proposal in its fact sheet about Trump’s visit, and its spokespeople declined to comment. But Trump has railed against the ICC in the past, demanding in December that it change its founding document to guarantee that it wouldn’t charge himself or any other American officials.

Trump, along with his Republican allies in Congress, has also blasted the ICC’s decision to issue arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. In February 2025, the White House imposed sanctions on the court itself, and last August, Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further by sanctioning the court’s judges.

Russia has its own concerns about the ICC, as the court has issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin for war crimes committed during Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Trump probably thinks that with this potential alliance, he could nullify possible ICC charges against the U.S. and Israel, and curry favor with Russia in the process.

The U.S. has a law on the books, the American Servicemembers’ Protection Act, which allows it to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to free any members of the U.S. military and “covered allied persons” who are detained by the court. As egregious as this law is, apparently it does not go far enough for Trump, who thinks he and Israel are unbound by any international laws.