Ex-VP Pence calls Trump's $1.8 billion fund 'deeply offensive'

María Paula Mijares Torres, Bloomberg News on May 31, 2026

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Former Vice President Mike Pence said it’s “deeply offensive” that a new $1.8 billion settlement fund created by the Trump administration to resolve the president’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service could be used to pay participants of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

The Justice Department said the fund would be used to compensate claims alleging political motivation of legal cases under a settlement resolving Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit over the 2019 disclosure of his tax records. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who previously worked as a personal lawyer for Donald Trump, said the president himself would not receive money from the fund.

“I think that the weaponization fund, it’s a bad idea from the start and I would encourage the administration just to drop it,” Pence said Sunday on NBC’s "Meet the Press." “It’s deeply offensive to me that you could have a fund that could even possibly compensate people who assaulted police officers or vandalized the Capitol on January 6th.”

As the vice president in Trump’s first term, Pence was presiding at the U.S. Capitol during the attempt by Trump supporters to violently stop the certification of the 2020 election for Joe Biden. Some rioters set up a scaffold and threatened to hang the vice president, while he and his family hid during the attack.

“The Justice Department has the ability to settle cases,” Pence said Sunday. “But let’s get rid of this fund.”

The fund is already facing legal challenges. On Friday, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily barred the Trump administration from taking steps to operate the fund while she considers a longer-lasting block. Another suit, filed by police who responded to the Capitol riots, called the fund “the most brazen act of presidential corruption this century.”

Pence joins a growing number of Republicans who have condemned the deal as improper, especially after administration officials said it could be used to pay Jan. 6 rioters who assaulted law-enforcement officers.

“In Washington, we don’t need slush funds to settle cases,” Pence said Sunday on CBS’s "Face the Nation," adding it’s appropriate for the department to consider settlements for individual cases where peoples’ rights have been violated.

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(With assistance from Paige Smith and Erik Larson.)

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