WASHINGTON (AP) — In negotiations with Republican senators whose support he needs to be confirmed as attorney general, Todd Blanche formally rescinded a $1.8 billion fund meant to compensate President Donald Trump's political allies.
But a sweeping audit immunity plan conferred on the president, his sons and the Trump Organization remains in place — given new parameters to appease the senators but still with the potential to wipe away millions of dollars of Trump's back taxes.
In a document Blanche sent to the lawmakers Sunday, he said the audit immunity, struck as part of a deal to resolve the president's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS, would not protect the president from the examination of future tax filings. Instead, he noted, it “applies by its terms only retroactively” to claims open at the time of the lawsuit's settlement.
For the holdout GOP lawmakers who opposed both the fund and the audit deal, those assurances were enough and are expected to clear the way for Blanche's confirmation to serve as attorney general.
But the political accommodation leaves in place a highly unusual agreement over the president's taxes that has spurred bipartisan outrage and tested confidence in the fairness of the tax system.
Trump’s audit immunity came as part of the controversial settlement crafted to resolve Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit filed earlier this year against the IRS over his leaked tax returns. The deal drew furor from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, largely over the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund.”
According to the initial outline of the audit deal, spelled out in a one-page document signed by Blanche, the U.S. was “forever barred and precluded” from examining or prosecuting any of the plaintiffs — Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization’s — current tax filings, as well as other “related or affiliated" individuals.
The document sent to Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis Sunday limits both the time frame for investigations and the scope of people who would receive audit protection to Trump, his sons Eric Trump and Donald Jr. and the Trump Organization.
It's unclear how much Trump owes the federal government in back taxes, but the latest details of the deal could wipe away what could be more than $100 million in back taxes, according to previous New York Times and ProPublica reporting.
Lawmakers and legal experts questioned the lawfulness of such protections.
“The good news is that Todd Blanche confirmed in writing that the anti-weaponization slush fund is dead. The bad news is that tax immunity for the president, his sons, and his family business is still alive," said Dan Greenberg, a senior legal fellow at the Cato Institute, calling the immunity deal "the product of an illegal settlement.”
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled in July that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was filed for an “improper purpose.” Williams did not void the deal shielding Trump from tax scrutiny but said the government cannot claim in official proceedings that the agreement was the result of a legitimate legal process. Trump has appealed the ruling.
Representatives from the White House, IRS, Treasury and Trump’s personal attorneys did not immediately respond to Associated Press requests for comment.
Some legal and tax experts say the immunity agreement could violate an IRS statute barring executive branch interference in taxpayer audits and investigations.
The statute says it’s against the law for the president or the president’s employees to start or stop an audit or some other investigation of a taxpayer. But the attorney general is allowed to do so, leaving the door open for Blanche to step in to halt an audit against the president, once he is confirmed. Whether he has legal authority to do so is a separate question not resolved by the statute itself.
The rule barring executive influence over directing tax audits comes after the Watergate scandal, when then-President Richard Nixon discussed using the IRS against political opponents and groups on the administration’s “enemies list.” Congress moved to tighten taxpayer privacy protections in 1976.
Nina Olson, founder of the Center for Taxpayer Rights, which has sued the Trump administration over IRS disclosures to immigration enforcement, called the settlement “the lowest point for the IRS since the 1970s."
Concerns over the future of government payouts to Trump allies have also not been entirely eased after Blanche's assurances.
Blanche has maintained under oath in Congress and in his latest writing to lawmakers that the Trump administration is not pursuing the fund.
However, Trump has been less clear about its demise. On Saturday he posted on his Truth Social platform that he would “push hard" for the fund if Blanche were not confirmed. "It will immediately be back on the table, and I will get it done," Trump wrote.
NYU Tax Law Center Policy Director Brandon DeBot questioned whether the fund was actually dead and said “it’s abundantly clear we need congressional action” to ensure it cannot be resurrected.
Democrats say Blanche’s order doesn’t go far enough to prevent the administration from reviving plans for the fund after the acting attorney general’s confirmation and have called for legislation to permanently bar it.
The order also doesn’t stop the administration from compensating Trump allies -- including people who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 -- through a previously established process that allows people to file claims for damages if they believed they were wronged by the government.
Greenberg said he believes Blanche's assurances are "a way for the senators to demonstrate that they’re driving a hard bargain.
“But once you become familiar with the particulars of this situation, it doesn’t really look like they’re driving much of a bargain at all,” he said.
FILE - Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
FILE - Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is sworn in as he appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, July 15, 2026. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)
President Donald Trump said Monday that newly planned talks with Tehran are the “last chance” for Iran to forge a deal and avoid an escalation of U.S. strikes on the country. Trump, speaking at the Oval Office, said he expects negotiations that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and create a pathway for Iran to address United States’ concerns about it’s nuclear program will begin in the next day or two.
Meanwhile, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche has issued a formal order terminating President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” to compensate his political allies. The move follows weeks of negotiations with two Republican senators who were blocking his nomination for the permanent job.
The order leaves in place a declaration — rejected by a judge as improper self-dealing — giving Trump and his family retroactive immunity for any tax audits.
Immigration remains a stronger issue for Trump than the economy or Iran, according to a new AP-NORC poll, even after three people were killed in encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement last month.
Here is the latest:
The president reiterated his disappointment with U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro for a court filing in which her office blamed a contractor’s shoddy work on the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool rather than vandalism.
“I guess she choked. I don’t know what the hell happened,” Trump said, later adding that the former Fox News host “folded like a cheap umbrella” in moving to drop criminal charges against the former Olympian accused of deliberately damaging the pool.
Trump refused to say whether he’d move to fire Pirro. But he also acknowledged that the contractor was “rushing” to finish the project before July 4 — which didn’t ultimately happen.
And he suggested he “didn’t know” the contactor working on it, contradicting his own comments from April when he said he chose the company involved since it had performed work at his golf course in Virginia.
Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement is set to expire Dec. 1 and there’s growing speculation that there could be a lockout that jeopardizes the 2027 season
The central point of contention is MLB owners push for a salary cap. Asked if he supported the owners push for a salary cap, Trump demurred.
“Well, we’re going to talk about that at a different time,” said Trump, a New York Yankees fan. “You know, it’s a complex situation, but not too complex for me.”
Trump said he’d welcome meeting with Janeese Lewis George, likely the next mayor of Washington, D.C., after he wrongly referred to her as a communist.
Lewis George is a self-described democratic socialist and a member of the D.C. Council who won the Democratic mayoral primary in June. In the overwhelmingly Democratic city, she is likely to take the top spot in November’s general election. She would succeed moderate Muriel Bowser, who decided to step down after three terms.
“I have not met her yet. I look forward to meeting her,” Trump said of Lewis George.
The U.S. president said major oil companies are earning excessive profits because of high oil prices.
“They made too much money, too much money, “ Trump said. “They ought to give some of that back to the public, and they better cut the retail price.”
Trump said he’s not happy with profits reported by Chevron and Exxon Mobil, even though the higher margins reflected energy prices that had increased after Trump launched a war with Iran and the Strait of Hormuz was effectively closed to oil and natural gas tankers.
Trump’s predecessor in the White House, Democrat Joe Biden, also attacked oil companies for their profits when inflation was a major problem with voters.
The president said, “I understand there’s been a sign off” but that “I don’t know what they agreed” to.
“I think Todd Blanche agreed to reconfirm things that he’s already said. And what he said was OK,” Trump added.
Two Republican Senators who had blocked the confirmation of Blanche, the acting attorney general, to lead the Justice Department said they’d reached an agreement to end the impasse.
Sens. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis said they struck a deal to formally rescind the $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that could have been used to compensate Trump supporters who overran the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Despite saying he didn’t know the details of the deal to advance Blanche’s nomination, Trump defended the fund, saying his supporters had been “treated very unfairly.”
The U.S. president defended an agreement to exempt him, his sons and his business from tax audits.
The IRS had until Trump audited presidents since 1977, but the administration struck a deal to avoid audits of Trump as part of what was an initial agreement to end a lawsuit over the leaking of his tax records.
Trump said that before he ran for president in 2016 that an IRS audit of him had been settled. He said the audit was then reopened and he used it during the campaign a decade ago to justify not releasing his tax returns as other candidates have done.
“They went after me illegally and they did a lot of bad things to me like they did to other people,” Trump said. “It was weaponized against me.”
A day after telling reporters that he’d look into the allegations against the Ohio congressman, Trump said he’ll let the families “figure that out.”
“It’s a very sad thing,” Trump told reporters Monday in the Oval Office. “I know Max. He’s a good person.”
Miller is accused of domestic violence by his former wife, Emily Moreno, the daughter of Ohio Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno, who is close to Trump. Miller denies the allegations.
The senator said Sunday that his former son-in-law should not serve in Congress.
“You know, those families, I know they’re working on it. It’s a very sad thing,” Trump said. “Especially when you know somebody so well to be going through that. But it’s accusations, and I’m going to let them figure that out.”
President Donald Trump said Monday that newly planned talks with Tehran are the “last chance” for Iran to forge a deal and avoid an escalation of U.S. strikes on the country.
Trump, speaking at the Oval Office, said he expects negotiations that will reopen the Strait of Hormuz and create a pathway for Iran to address United States’ concerns about it’s nuclear program will begin in the next day or two.
The Republican president says, “The first phase is the opening of the straits. The second phase will be the denuclearization.” Trump says that ”will take a little while.”
While Trump has reveled in the U.S. military decimating layers of Tehran’s leadership and devastating its air force and navy, Iran is betting it can outlast Trump as he faces diminished stockpiles of munitions and the difficulty of executing a war that is unpopular with the American electorate ahead of November’s midterm election.
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The order creates the “Presidential Military Spouse Commission” to address issues facing troops and their families. Jennifer Hegseth, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s wife, will lead it, Trump said.
The president said the new commission would “develop suggestions to address particular challenges in housing, employment, health care, education, child childcare and just about everything else you can think of.”
Many of the issues have been tackled in various forms by multiple administrations.
Jennifer Hegseth’s role mirrors that of other defense secretary spouses who have advocated for families while their husbands ran the Pentagon. Charlene Austin, Lloyd Austin’s wife, sat on the advisory boards for the Purdue Military Family Research Institute, and Military Child Education Coalition.
Trump is venting about the status of peace talks with Iran.
He criticized Iran's leadership for claiming that its meetings with Oman on Monday were focused solely on establishing a temporary route for safe navigation through the Strait of Hormuz.
The president previously said he held off on a massive weekend strike against Iran because there was another framework for a ceasefire and the full reopening of the strait to oil and natural gas tankers.
“Iranian Leadership is unbelievably duplicitous!” Trump posted on social media Monday. “They ask for a meeting, some would say “beg,” talks begin, with more scheduled in the immediate future, and they say, openly and proudly, that they’re not having any discussions, that nothing is being talked about, and they’re only dealing with ‘Oman.’”
Trump said whether “Iran wants to admit it or not, we are, in fact, talking” about preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons.
The Trump administration is packing immigration courtrooms with speedier hearings to clear a decades-long backlog in asylum claims. New data shows a historic rise in missed court dates and immediate deportation orders as judges struggle to keep up the pace.
Hundreds of immigrants’ cases a day are being assigned to individual judges as the number of “mega” master hearings significantly increase. More than 1,300 were held in June alone, a nearly threefold jump from the previous June, according to Mobile Pathways, a nonprofit that tracks immigration court data.
The data also shows that courts have severely cut preparation time in complex immigration proceedings, so people are missing hearings and being told they’ve abandoned their asylum claims at unprecedented rates.
Those who favor limiting immigration see this as a course-correction for a longstanding problem. But the nonprofit’s chief operating officer says cases are being closed without being heard.
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Two Republican senators who threatened to block acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s bid to lead the Justice Department said Monday that they will vote to advance his nomination, ending an impasse over plans to create a fund to compensate the president’s allies.
The statement from Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Thom Tillis came after Blanche issued an order late Sunday formally rescinding the $1.8 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to compensate people who believe they were unfairly prosecuted by the Justice Department.
Cornyn and Tillis had said they would not support Blanche’s nomination without written confirmation that the fund is dead.
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The president knows the world hangs on his every word. Now he wants you to pay for it.
Trump’s Truth Social business began selling sneak peeks of his social media posts on Saturday, offering early access to market-moving news to Wall Street traders willing to pay up. The move raises the prospect of big profits for Trump’s company, and big questions about insider trading and using public office for private gain.
Similar fast-speed feeds are sold by other social media firms and media providers, but Truth Social doesn’t just distribute the news, it makes it as Trump announces changes on everything from war to central bank leadership to tariffs.
“If this was the CEO of a public company, this would be jail time,” said Irene Aldridge, head of Able Alpha Trading.
Initial sales details may be disclosed when Truth Social’s parent company announces quarterly earnings.
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Tuesday’s Senate primary in Michigan between congresswoman Haley Stevens and public health official Abdul El-Sayed is one of the clearest tests yet of where Democratic voters want their party to go.
El-Sayed is a progressive backed by Sen. Bernie Sanders who’s run against much of the Democratic establishment. Stevens is backed by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and has made electability and experience central to her case.
The winner faces Republican Mike Rogers in November for an open seat Democrats likely need to hold to take control of the Senate next year.
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The U.S. president said on social media that independent surveys showing low approval ratings are false — denying a clear trend of lower support for Trump because of inflation and the Iran war, among other issues.
“My REAL Polling Numbers, not those made up by the Fake News Media, are the best they have ever been,” Trump asserted, providing no data to back up his claim.
The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that just 33% of U.S. adults approve of Trump. That survey from late July also showed a drop since the start of Trump’s second term in adults who “strongly approve” of him.
Contrary to the evidence of multiple surveys, Trump said his popularity is based on his income tax cuts, his job numbers, his efforts to secure the U.S. border with Mexico and his use of American military force in Venezuela and Iran.
The White House said the president will go to California and Nevada to talk up the economy and border security and slam Democrats ahead of the November elections.
Trump on Tuesday will attend a Republican National Committee dinner at the Trump National Golf Club in Los Angeles.
On Wednesday, the president is slated to talk about the economy at Red Rock Casino in Las Vegas.
Oil prices are easing and helping to calm Wall Street’s worries that inflation could potentially get even worse. That has U.S. stock indexes rising early Monday, but several major chip stocks are falling again including Micron and AMD.
The S&P 500 rose 0.4%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 625 points, and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.2%. The price of a barrel of Brent crude fell 5.1% to $83.42 after Trump said over the weekend he would hold off on ordering new strikes against Iran at the urging of allies in the region. Treasury yields fell.
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The Trump administration is planning a dramatic overhaul of Head Start that would gut its quality standards, two people familiar with the deliberations said.
Head Start, established in the 1960s to help fight poverty, has long been considered by experts to be a gold standard for early education. It has more than 100 pages of regulations that cover everything from child-to-teacher ratios and child health screenings to family engagement.
The Republicans would replace these with around a dozen pages of rules that leave most specifics to state and local law, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the information is not yet public and they feared reprisal.
The draft rules would require more documentation from homeless or unemployed parents, and an early version would have barred even the U.S. citizen children of parents who are in the United States illegally.
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The U.S. dollar weakened sharply against the Japanese yen on Monday after Trump and Japan’s finance minister confirmed that both sides had intervened in markets.
The yen’s prolonged weakness against the dollar has been a source of frustration for Tokyo. Since Japan imports so much of what it consumes, a weak currency pushes prices higher. High oil prices have amplified pressure on Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi to do more to address the rising cost of living.
Normally, foreign exchange markets determine the relative values of currencies, and officials usually stay mum on any interventions, but Trump confirmed it on Sunday.
A weaker dollar makes U.S.-made goods more competitive. Analysts are describing the intervention as a “low-cost” way for Washington to pay a favor to a key U.S. ally.
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The document released by Blanche on Sunday night keeps a provision of the IRS settlement that provided broad tax-audit immunity for Trump and family, while limiting its scope.
It clarifies that the immunity “applies by its terms only retroactively” to claims open at the time of the settlement, and does not protect the president from examination of future tax filings.
On Friday, Trump’s attorneys notified a court they would appeal a judge’s scathing ruling that characterized the settlement of the president’s lawsuit against the IRS as an improper exercise in self-dealing.
The judge said that because Trump manipulated the court system by suing an agency he controls, the government cannot claim in official proceedings that the agreement resulted from a legitimate legal process.
Trump said new talks to wind down the war in Iran and revive traffic through the Strait of Hormuz will start Monday afternoon, after announcing he is holding off on new massive strikes he had threatened to unleash on the country. Iranian state media, however, quoted the country’s foreign ministry as saying Tehran was not currently holding negotiations with the United States.
Israel struck the Gaza Strip again over the weekend, after the U.S. and Hamas said a deal was reached for the militant group to disarm, a potential step toward ending the war in Gaza that depends on Israel stopping its attacks. The Israeli military said the strikes targeted militant operatives.
Hospitals in Gaza said at least 17 people were killed, including children. A strike on one residential apartment killed three family members including a 4-year-old child, according to Nasser hospital, where the bodies arrived.
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Immigration remains a stronger issue for Trump than the economy or Iran, according to a new AP-NORC poll, even after three people were killed in encounters with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in July.
Trump is not getting a glowing endorsement on his immigration approach from Americans overall, the new survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found: Only 39% of U.S. adults approve of his performance on immigration, a decline from 49% at the beginning of his second term.
Despite that, about 8 in 10 Republicans continue to approve of how Trump is handling immigration. That’s a slight decline from the beginning of Trump’s second term, when about 9 in 10 Republicans approved, but his support within his base has been mostly stable despite a chaotic year of immigration enforcement actions.
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., from left, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Vice President JD Vance attend a cabinet meeting, Friday, July 31, 2026, at Camp David, the presidential retreat, near Thurmont, Md., Friday, July 31, 2026. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
President Donald Trump carries an umbrella as he exits Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Md., Sunday, Aug. 2, 2026, on return to Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
