Immediately after the Trump administration unveiled its $1.776 billion “fund” this week, Democrats and legal experts didn’t just condemn the gambit as a “slush fund,” they also focused on which of Donald Trump’s allies are most likely to benefit from payouts.

One of the central questions was unavoidable: Would Team Trump start writing taxpayer-financed checks to Jan. 6 rioters?

The day after the initiative was unveiled, JD Vance spoke to reporters at length in the White House press briefing room, where the vice president left the door wide open to payouts to those who attacked the U.S. Capitol. Instead of ruling out the possibility of checks for convicted criminals who violently assaulted police officers, for example, Vance told MS NOW’s Jake Traylor, “We’re going to look at everything case by case.”

The Ohio Republican added, “Let’s turn the page on this thing that we did under the last administration where we tried to throw people in prison because they had the wrong politics,” pointing to developments that simply did not happen in reality.

A few hours earlier, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former Trump defense lawyer, made related comments during testimony before a Senate Appropriations Committee panel, though there was a line of questioning about a specific Jan. 6 rioter that stood out.

Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen reminded Blanche that the president pardoned one rioter who went on to sexually abuse children, noting that the criminal “actually tried to buy the silence of these children by saying that he would pay them some of the funds he was hoping to get from your slush fund.”

The Maryland senator asked the acting attorney general, “Can you commit to making the rules so that that person is not eligible for a payout under this fund?”

It should have been pretty easy for Blanche to say that the administration had no intention of rewarding child abusers with public funds. But that’s not what he said.

“Well, you’re obviously lying in your question, because there’s no way this person committed to that,” he told Van Hollen.

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Steve Benen

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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• Possible ‘slush fund’ payout for a specific Jan. 6 rioter trips up DOJ’s Todd Blanche