Republican Senator Grills Todd Blanche on Trump’s Shady Slush Fund

Republican Senator John Cornyn directed serious concerns about the status of President Trump’s “anti-weaponization” slush fund to acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

In a series of well-directed questions, the Texas senator undermined the very basis of the settlement agreement resolving the Trump family’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over Trump’s leaked tax returns, which created the slush fund.

“There’s so much that’s unusual about this,” Cornyn said. “[The leaked tax returns] happened back in 2020, and the lawsuit wasn’t brought until 2026, so with the two-year statute of limitations … that struck me as unusual.”

Cornyn then moved on to the text of the settlement agreement.

“On page four: ‘This settlement agreement … may be modified only upon the written agreement of the parties’ Has there been a written agreement of the parties to modify the settlement fund?”

“No, the settlement fund is just not moving forward,” Blanche replied. “There’s no modification. It’s just it never started. No money went from the Treasury to any other account. There’s no commissioners. It’s not moving forward.”

“Is the settlement agreement enforceable as a contract by the parties?”

“Well, yes, it’s an enforceable document,” Blanche conceded. “So I suppose if President Trump’s counsel sought to enforce it, that they potentially could.”

“Including the weaponization fund,” Cornyn said, making the obvious connection.

“Well, they could try to enforce the contract. They can’t force the Department of Justice to move forward with the weaponization fund. They could potentially say that, I suppose, that we breached by not moving forward. They haven’t done that, and I’m not aware that they’re planning on doing that,” Blanche replied.

Cornyn then asked directly what Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, had been avoiding.

“But just to be clear, the president of the United States, who was the plaintiff in this lawsuit, has not agreed in writing to delete the weaponization fund, and there’s no guarantee that he or one of the other plaintiffs might raise that issue by way of a lawsuit and a breach of contract lawsuit in the future?”

“Well, senator, the plaintiffs have no power over the fund. The fund was administered solely by the five commissioners and through the Department of Justice. So no, they don’t have any power with respect to the fund at all. I suppose they could bring a lawsuit, and then we would litigate it. But even if we were litigating it, there’s no fund, so the results of such litigation, whatever it would be, wouldn’t be a revival of the fund.”

Blanche can say how dead the slush fund is as much as he wants, but that won’t convince anyone until it’s actually in writing, which it isn’t. It’s a bad look for Blanche when even Republicans realize that.

Six years later, Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential election conspiracy is still going strong.

During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee Wednesday, Trump’s pick to run National Intelligence—Jay Clayton—refused to plainly acknowledge who won the 2020 election, admitting only after a lengthy back-and-forth with Maine Senator Angus King that Joe Biden “became the president of the United States.”

Clayton initially said Biden had been certified, during an exchange with committee Vice Chairman Mark Warner. But he grew testy when King revisited the subject.

“Who won the 2020 election?” asked King.

“I’ve answered that question, I’m not going to get into that,” Clayton rebuffed, throwing his hands in the air.

“You have not answered that question,” insisted King. “Who won the 2020 election? It’s a pretty simple question.”

“I’ll give you the same answer. My answer to the chairman was, he asked me if I’m an election denier. I’m not an election denier. Joe Biden was certified as the president, he went through his process, he went through our electoral process. I can tell you that I was in my seat at the FCC and—” Clayton said, before King again insisted that he answer the question.

“Who won the 2020 election?” repeated King.

“As I said, he went through our processes, and Joe Biden became the president of the United States,” Clayton said.

“I’m going to ask you one more time—” King said, before Clayton interjected that he had only appeared on the Capitol to “talk about my qualifications.”

“One of your qualifications is you told us you’re going to hold truth to power, and you won’t answer a very simple question,” King said. “You have not answered. Saying Joe Biden was certified is not an answer.”

Later in the hearing, Senator Mark Kelly picked up where King left off, asking Clayton “why Joe Biden was certified as the winner of the 2020 election.”

“I really—going back to my constitutional law here—I don’t want to get in a debate about this, but I believe he had the most electoral votes,” Clayton responded.

“So he won the election?” pressed Kelly.

“He followed our process, had the most electoral votes, was declared the winner,” Clayton continued, laughing.

“And who has the most electoral votes? Is it the person who wins, or the person that loses?” asked Kelly.

“I think that’s your characterization,” Clayton shrugged.

When Senator Jon Ossoff again brought up the topic, Clayton stopped trying to answer altogether.

“Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question, to have to indulge the president’s delusions?” Ossoff pressed. But Clayton was unmoved.

Donald Trump shrugged off the U.S. strikes on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, Iran, in February, which killed nearly 200 people, most of them schoolchildren.

The official investigation into that incident remains under wraps. Democratic senators have urged its release, while the Pentagon has stated that an investigation remains ongoing. Officially, the United States has refused to accept responsibility for its attack. But according to various media reports, American officials and investigators behind the scenes have acknowledged U.S. forces’ culpability.

In a Fox News interview aired Tuesday, the president was asked whether the investigation’s findings would be released. Trump did not answer the question, inspiring little confidence that they will ever see the light of day. 

Instead, he did his best to avoid accountability and paint the clear-cut atrocity in shades of gray.

“I don’t think anybody’s gonna ever be able to say what happened there,” the president said. “Because if they don’t know by now, and as of a couple of weeks ago they didn’t know, and while things like that happen in war, there were missiles flying all over the place. And I don’t know how anybody could say that we shot it.”

Trump’s previous statements have, similarly, cast doubt on the prospect of accountability for the Minab school attack. Asked about the attack last month, Trump said, “We’re talking about a long time ago. Nobody did that on purpose.… Mistakes are made. War is nasty.” He  then punted the issue of a published report on the incident to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Recent health code violations at Trump National Golf Club Washington D.C. were apparently “politically motivated,” according to the club.

Membership at the luxury club starts with a $100,000 initiation fee, but its price tag evidently does not assure total cleanliness. Health inspectors that visited the site on June 30 found pest problems, a lack of adequate handwashing facilities, and a slew of food safety violations.

Yet the golf club has not only denied the Health and Human Services report obtained by NOTUS, it also suggested that the reported problems were merely a political construct.

“We operate our properties to the highest health and safety standards. These so-called ‘violations’ are fabricated, politically motivated, and completely without merit. We stand firmly behind the integrity of our operations and reject these baseless claims,” the golf course told NOTUS in a statement.

A health inspector spotted “a large quantity of small flies in the storage room near the employee restrooms,” per the report. The inspector also wrote that the facility was using and storing pest control products unfit for use in a food establishment, though they observed that the club remedied the situation by removing the “pesticides from the food establishment.”

At the club’s more casual eatery, the inspector noted that several food products were stored at temperatures warmer than permitted by the health code, including blue cheese, sausage links, sausage patties, and pasta. All of those foods were kept at temperatures within a range referred to by the USDA as the “danger zone,” as it permits the sudden growth of dangerous bacteria—such as salmonella, E. coli, and staph—that can cause food poisoning at best and death at worst.

“The person in charge voluntarily discarded the blue cheese and sausage,” the inspector wrote.

Donald Trump’s D.C. club is far from the only property under his company umbrella that has experienced unsavory health code violations. Health officials found insects, rodents, and dirty surfaces at Trump National Golf Club Westchester, and the Trump International Hotel in Chicago has also found itself plagued by flies, NOTUS reported earlier this year.

Elon Musk may have broken the law when he got involved in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court election.

The Wisconsin Elections Commission referred two complaints to the Brown County district attorney’s office last week, saying that Musk’s promise to hand out $1 million checks to voters could have been election bribery. The tech CEO and groups he backed spent at least $20 million in support of the Republican-backed candidate, Brad Schimel, in a bid to flip control of the court to conservatives. Schimel ended up losing the election to the Democratic-backed candidate, Susan Crawford.

The commission voted 5-1 in a closed session to refer two confidential complaints from Milwaukee and Green Bay, and under state law, prosecutors have 40 days to notify the commission on whether they decide to prosecute. At issue is “a social media post that offered one million dollars to individuals who voted in the 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court Election in order to induce them to vote in that election,” the commission’s motion stated.

“On Sunday night, I will give a talk in Wisconsin,” Musk posted on X at the time. “Entrance is limited to those who have voted in the Supreme Court election. I will also personally hand over two checks for a million dollars each in appreciation for you taking the time to vote. This is super important.”

Musk deleted that post, and then posted again the same day attempting to clarify that “entrance is limited to those who have signed the petition in opposition to activist judges. I will also hand over checks for a million dollars to two people to be spokesmen for the petition.”

Musk gave out two $1 million checks at a Brown County rally on March 30, 2025, two days before the election. His America PAC gave out another $1 million check to a different Wisconsin voter who signed the petition against “activist judges.” Throughout the campaign, the PAC offered to send registered voters in the state $100 to either sign the petition or refer another person to sign it.

Musk escaped any consequences for offering million-dollar giveaways to voters during the 2024 presidential election. Now, it seems he might face the music for getting involved in a smaller election, one that didn’t even pay off for him in the end.