President Trump said Thursday that he is willing to temporarily withdraw his nomination of Todd Blanche to be attorney general rather than give in to the demands from two Senate Republicans who are pushing for concessions related to the controversial settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service.
Negotiations to resolve the standoff reportedly continued Thursday afternoon and made some progress, but the fate of Blanche’s nomination — and the details of any concessions the holdout senators might win — remain unclear.
Senate Republicans were forced to postpone a planned Judiciary Committee vote Thursday to advance Blanche’s nomination after Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis failed to get the written assurances they were demanding about the settlement deal. With all Democrats opposed to confirming Blanche, a “no” vote from either GOP senator would likely doom his nomination.
The GOP holdouts want to make sure that a proposed $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund is officially dead. The Trump administration had agreed to create the fund and then scrapped it in the face of bipartisan outrage over the likelihood that it would serve as a slush fund benefitting the president’s allies.
The senators have also been pressing to clarify and limit a deal that would shield Trump, his family and his business from IRS tax audits “forever.” Cornyn and Tillis are reportedly pressing the administration to expressly limit the agreement to existing audits, not future filings. That element of the agreement reportedly is the main sticking point.
Both Cornyn and Tillis have just months left in office after clashing with Trump and have made clear they are willing to continue their fight against the IRS settlement. They blamed the White House for standing in the way of a deal.
“I think as far as Blanche and the Department of Justice, we were pretty much on the same page,” Cornyn told reporters Thursday. “But then when the president got wind of it, he wasn’t willing to go along with it.”
Tillis reportedly suggested that Trump’s refusal to formally kill off the payout fund raises suspicions that the White House may still hope to revive the arrangement. “The president’s getting bad advice. He should listen to Blanche and others who think if it’s dead, it should be rendered completely dead,” Tillis told reporters.
Trump, in response to the senators’ demands, threatened to have Blanche continue in his current role as acting attorney general until the holdouts are gone.
“Todd Blanche is a STAR, and everyone knows it!” Trump wrote in a post on his social media site, adding, “I have no objection to temporarily withdrawing Todd’s name, if they do not do the right thing, and putting him back after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office.”
Cornyn pushed back in a social media post of his own.
“POTUS is mistaken if he believes concerns about the provisions in his tax lawsuit settlement are limited to me and Senator Tillis,” he wrote, referring to Trump.
Republicans kill an effort to block Trump’s immunity deal: As Cornyn and Tillis worked to resolve their concerns over Blanche and the Trump-IRS settlement, Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday blocked a Democratic effort to end the audit immunity portion of the agreement altogether.
As the committee considered a tax administration bill, Sen. Ron Wyden, the top Democrat on the panel, offered an amendment that would have banned the IRS from entering an audit immunity deal with a sitting president, their family or related entities.
The Democrats argue that Trump’s immunity deal is already illegal, even without their amendment, but the measure they offered would also have extended the statute of limitations so that Trump and his family could have their past filings audited by the IRS under a new administration.
“Trump’s sweetheart audit immunity deal is perhaps the most brazenly corrupt action taken by a president in American history, and Congress must permanently put a stop to the unchecked greed on display,” Wyden said in a statement yesterday.
On Thursday morning, Republicans defeated the amendment in a 14-13 vote along party lines. Republican Sen. Mike Crapo, the Finance Committee chair, reportedly argued that the amendment would likely doom the Taxpayer Assistance and Service Act, a bipartisan bill to modernize the IRS and improve efficiency in tax administration.
“This is not the place,” Crapo reportedly said of the Democratic amendment, arguing that the proposed changes would erode bipartisan support for the broader legislation and “would turn this bill into a bill that has a much dimmer future for becoming law.”
In the end, the Finance Committee advanced the bill in a 26-1 vote, with only Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren opposing the measure. “No other taxpayer, ever, has gotten this kind of a deal,” she said, according to Politico. “I cannot support a bill that rubber stamps Donald Trump’s corruption. Congress needs to stand up and put a stop to it.”
The bottom line: The standoff continues. While Tillis argues that the settlement agreement and payout fund make for horrible policy and politics, Trump may have little to lose in shrugging off the senators’ demands. As he said in his social media post, pulling Blanche’s nomination wouldn’t prevent the acting attorney general from continuing in the job under that title or as deputy attorney general, the post he was confirmed to by the Senate last year.