CNN’s Elie Honig Says Blanche Promise On Trump Fund ‘Accomplishes Essentially Nothing’

CNN anchor Pamela Brown spoke with senior legal analyst Elie Honig on Monday as news broke that Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) struck a deal to support Todd Blanche’s attorney general nomination in exchange for a written guarantee killing Trump’s $1.8 billion weaponization fund.

“Elie, what do you make of this deal, which appears to have ultimately secured the support of Republican senators Cornyn and Tillis, those Republican holdouts?” Brown asked Honig.

“Well, Pam, for all the drama around this written document from Todd Blanche, it really accomplishes essentially nothing as a legal matter, and here’s why,” Honig replied, adding:

The original parties to that agreement that set up the slush fund and the IRS immunity deal — there were two parties: the federal government and Donald Trump, private individual. Todd Blanche, on behalf of one of those parties, the federal government, had already testified under oath that he considered the fund dead. Now he’s put that in writing, which is no different, really, than him testifying under oath. So we have that part, but what we don’t have is the other party, Donald Trump, signing onto this.

And so, at least theoretically, there’s a possibility Donald Trump, in his private capacity, through his lawyers, could go back to court and say, “Wait a second, we had a deal here. Both of us agreed to it a few months ago, and now one side wants out — DOJ wants out. But we don’t agree. We don’t want to let them out.”

And in fact, if you look back, when Todd Blanche testified in his confirmation hearing, Senator Cornyn asked him about exactly that scenario, and Blanche agreed — yeah, I guess there is a way the other side could go in and try to revitalize this deal. So, all this drama around, “Will Blanche put it in writing?” — now he has, and apparently that has satisfied Cornyn and Tillis, but it actually does nothing legally to put a formal end to this deal.

“That’s a really important point. So are you surprised that this anti-weaponization fund had become the sticking point in Blanche’s confirmation?” Brown followed up.

“Well, I’ve learned never to expect anything in particular from the House or the Senate. But yes — look, the weaponization fund absolutely was deserving of criticism and ridicule, really, by Cornyn and Tillis and others. And it’s a good thing that Blanche has at least walked away from it now,” Honig replied, adding:

Also, though, I will say the focus on the fund has sort of overwhelmed focus on Blanche’s mishandling of the Epstein files — that’s squarely on him. His mistreatment of the victims of Epstein — that’s squarely on him. And how about the weaponization? How about the series of prosecutions that have been brought against Trump’s political enemies, sometimes at the president’s specific behest, that have uniformly failed thus far? All of those things are on Todd Blanche too, because he’s either been deputy AG or acting AG from the start. And yet that seems to have fallen a distant third, behind these other two things, in terms of the Senate’s attention.

Watch the clip above via CNN.

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