The Attorney Who Surrendered a Billion Dollars Without Filing a Single Motion

Guest article by Dina Doll

Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche takes his seat to testify before a Senate subcommittee on the Justice Department’s proposed 2027 budget on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., U.S., May 19, 2026. REUTER/Evelyn Hockstein

On May 12, Donald Trump stood at the White House and said out loud, about his acting Attorney General: “He kept me out of jail for years.”

That man now runs the Justice Department.

And what he just did with that power may be the most legally consequential act of self-dealing in American history.

Here is what happened. Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS in January. So what did Blanche do to defend the American people he was now supposed to represent?

Nothing. Trump filed three motions. Blanche didn’t file a single piece of paper.

After Trump asked for an extension, Judge Kathleen Williams questioned whether she could even constitutionally review the case. She ordered both sides to separately explain, in their own words, whether they were genuinely adversarial, a basic constitutional requirement for any federal lawsuit, since it appeared Trump was suing himself. She cited Trump’s own words admitting as much.

The deadline was Wednesday.

A typical defense lawyer would have seized that opening. A motion to dismiss. A jurisdictional challenge. Something. Any private attorney who let that opportunity pass would face a malpractice claim before the ink dried.

Instead, Blanche rushed a settlement through two days before the deadline.

First: a permanent end to any IRS audit of Trump, his businesses, and every member of his family. Every pending audit. Every past return. Gone. Forever. The one-page addendum Blanche signed declared the federal government forever barred and precluded from pursuing any and all claims that have been or could have been asserted against Trump, his family, or his businesses, including the Trump Organization and all related trusts, companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries.

All of it. Untouchable. Permanently.

A typical lawyer would be sued for malpractice for far less.

Then came the fund.

Blanche created a $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, that number is not an accident, to be distributed by a five-member commission that he, the acting attorney general, appoints.

There is no precedent in American history for a government fund that could pay the people who tried to destroy it. Until now.

I recently interviewed Officer Michael Fanone for the MeidasTouch Network. He is still telling his story. He should not have to be.

Capitol Police Officer Fanone was tased at the base of his skull and beaten until he suffered a heart attack on the steps of the Capitol. He still lives with traumatic brain injury. Officer Brian Sicknick was struck with a chemical irritant and collapsed; he died the following day. Officer Harry Dunn described being called racial slurs while being crushed in a doorway. Officer Aquilino Gonell testified that he believed he was going to die. Four officers who survived that day later died by suicide.

That Fanone still has to speak out, still has to walk into rooms and recount the worst moments of his life so that the truth doesn’t disappear entirely beneath the lies of Trump and his Republican allies, is itself an indictment. His testimony should be history by now. Instead, it is resistance.

These are the people on one side of January 6th.

When asked before Congress whether people convicted of attacking those officers could receive payments from the fund, Blanche declined to rule it out.

Now consider the timing.

This settlement did not arrive in a vacuum. It arrived as the midterms take shape. Men who demonstrated on January 6th that they would violently overturn an election result are now potentially being paid before voters go to the polls again. This is not simply a corruption story. A corruption story is about the past. The purpose of the Department of Justice is to keep us safe, yet this action makes me feel very unsafe. I don’t need to imagine what a funded, rewarded, newly legitimized network of political violence looks like six months from now. We already saw it once.

Now they will be paid for it, out of a billion-dollar fund. A permanent shield. A payment to the people who tried to burn it all down. The Justice Department did not defend this country. He turned it into a weapon against the people it was built to protect. And the man who did it is still the acting attorney general.

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Dina Doll is an experienced attorney and legal analyst. She hosts the MissTrial podcast on MeidasTouch and co-hosts Unprecedented on Legal AF. Dina also serves as the legal expert for Access Hollywood’s Trial Files and provides regular legal commentary for CNN, NewsNation, and other national media outlets. In addition to her media work, she is a delegate to the California Democratic Party, a community activist, and a City Library Commissioner.