The Justice Department's No. 3 official briefly admitted on X that the agency was moving to revive a controversial fund to compensate Jan. 6 defendants — then deleted the post on Wednesday.
Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward, Jr. responded to a post from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) with a terse three-word reply — "We're on it." — before quietly scrubbing it. Politico's Josh Gerstein flagged the deletion.
The admission came just hours after Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies that the DOJ's $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" was finished — permanently. "Look, we're not moving forward with the fund. Period," Blanche told the panel. Asked by Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY) if that meant never, Blanche said: "Correct."
Graham had proposed threading the needle on the dead fund. While acknowledging Blanche's announcement, he argued that "there are many victims of the weaponized Biden Justice Department" and proposed routing claims through the existing Federal Tort Claims Act process instead of creating a new system.
Critics in both parties had hammered the fund as a "slush fund" — a nearly $1.8 billion pot of taxpayer money with no judicial review, no congressional oversight, and commissioners the president could fire at will. A federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia had already temporarily blocked it.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, called it a "racket" designed to funnel taxpayer dollars to "insurrectionists, rioters, and white supremacists." Even roughly half of Senate Republicans were unhappy with the fund, according to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX).
Woodward's deleted post raises fresh questions about whether the administration intends to pursue Graham's workaround — and whether Blanche's "period" means what he said it did.
