Blanche Built Trump a $1.776 Billion Fund. Now Two Republicans Won't Confirm Him.

The “1776 fund” pays the president's allies and shields his family from audits — the same deal that got the IRS's top lawyer fired, and got Blanche referred to the bar. His confirmation, and the Epstein files, hang on Tillis and Cornyn.

President Trump swears in Todd Blanche as deputy attorney general. White House photo.

Two dozen women who survived Jeffrey Epstein wrote to Senators Thom Tillis and John Cornyn on Tuesday and asked them to sink Todd Blanche. The two Republicans sit on the Judiciary Committee, and either one can stop Trump's acting attorney general from ever running the Justice Department for good. The letter is the survivors' last move — and the fight it joins is no longer really about the Epstein files. It is about a fund.

Tillis calls it “the 1776.” The Justice Department built the $1.776 billion pot to pay Trump allies who say earlier administrations persecuted them — a compensation fund for the president's friends, dressed in a patriotic number.

The fund was born in a settlement. Trump sued the IRS for $10 billion over the leak of his tax returns, and in May his own Justice Department settled the case with him. The settlement did two things at once: it stood up the fund to pay his allies, and it shielded Trump and his family from tax audits reaching back years — what Tillis calls the “get-out-of-audit-free card.” On July 13 a federal judge ruled that Trump had brought the lawsuit “for an improper purpose” and referred the lawyer who filed it — Todd Blanche — to the bar.

That is the same settlement that ended Ken Kies, the IRS's top lawyer, who refused to work on it and lost his job. Blanche took the other path. He built it, defended it, and is now asking the Senate to make him the country's chief law-enforcement officer while a bar complaint over it hangs over his head. Every Judiciary Committee Democrat, led by Senator Peter Welch, has asked for an investigation into whether Blanche told the committee the truth.

Blanche says the fund is finished. “We are not moving forward with the fund. Period,” he told House members. Trump and the Justice Department keep leaving the door open, and that gap is the whole fight. Tillis will vote yes only if Congress bans the fund and the audit shield by law; the Senate already voted his ban down once. Cornyn does not believe the fund is dead — asked if he was still worried, he said only, “yup, yup” — but Cornyn is fighting for his political life in a Texas primary against Ken Paxton, and a vote against Trump could end him. Neither Republican has committed.

The Epstein files sit under all of it. Blanche controls them and has kept them sealed, months after Trump promised to release them. His one concession, a July meeting Tillis forced him to hold, left the survivors worse off: Annie Farmer called him “abrasive, condescending”; another survivor said he “gaslit” them and swore nothing in the files could lead anywhere; Dani Bensky said he ignored their requests to meet until his confirmation was at risk. Their letter called the meeting “a box-checking exercise arranged only after his confirmation was put at risk.”

The vote comes down to two Republicans and one question: is the fund dead, or only waiting for a confirmed attorney general to revive it? Blanche says it is dead. He also promised the Epstein files were coming.