Thankfully, there is a group of anti-Trump RINOs departing Congress in January, and frankly, it can’t come a moment too soon. One of them is Texas ‘GOP’ Sen. John Cornyn, who appears to be on a revenge tour against the president on his way out the door.Cornyn had no problem with the Anti-Weaponization Fund. Not one word of public objection. Not a single concern raised. Not even a raised eyebrow about the legal architecture or the settlement terms.
Then Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over him in the Texas Senate primary. Paxton won. And suddenly Cornyn discovered a principled objection to the very fund he’d been silent about for months.
Trump put it on Truth Social Friday morning, and the statement is worth reading in full because it names exactly what’s happening: “John Cornyn never had a problem with the so called ‘Fund,’ which will not benefit me, but rather the great American Patriots who were hunted down like dogs and whose lives were unfairly and illegally destroyed by the Crooked Joe Biden Administration, until after I decided to Endorse and Support his Republican Primary opponent in Texas.”
There it is. Laid out plainly. Documented. Timestamped. Cornyn’s objection to the Anti-Weaponization Fund materialized the moment he became a lame duck — which is to say, the moment he lost his primary to the candidate Trump backed. The people the fund was designed to help — the individuals targeted by Biden’s weaponized DOJ, the men and women whose lives were upended by politically motivated prosecutions — are now being used as leverage in John Cornyn’s personal score-settling operation.
Trump called it what it is: a situation where “there has perhaps never been a group of people treated so badly in our Nation’s history” being weaponized by a departing senator against the administration that’s trying to help them. The irony that Cornyn is weaponizing the Anti-Weaponization Fund to settle a political grudge is not lost on anyone paying attention.
The mechanics of the obstruction are worth understanding. Blanche needs every Republican vote because not a single Democrat will support him. One Republican holdout is all it takes. Cornyn knows this. Tillis — doing his own version of the same thing — knows this too. Together they’ve turned Todd Blanche’s confirmation into a hostage situation, and the hostages are the Americans the Anti-Weaponization Fund was created to compensate.
Trump gave up his own substantial portion of the settlement — the money he personally could have received for the Mar-a-Lago raid and other documented abuses — specifically so it could go to help others. That’s the fund Cornyn is now blocking while claiming principle.
Trump’s closing line — “Thank you for your attention to this matter” — carries the distinct tone of a man who has already decided what happens next. The likely workarounds are keeping Blanche as acting AG, or pulling the nomination and resubmitting it to the new Senate in January when Cornyn is gone and Paxton is in.
Cornyn’s revenge tour ends January 3rd. The people he’s using as pawns deserve better than this from a senator spending his final months this way.