According to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), via an early Friday morning edition of his podcast, Republican senators were “blasting” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche during a tense meeting over President Donald Trump’s new “anti-weaponization fund.”

The Department of Justice’s new $1.776 billion fund, which was created as part of the settlement from Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS over the 2019 leak of his tax returns, has gotten its fair share of Republican criticism since its announcement on Monday.

Speaking about the meeting between Blanche and Republican senators to discuss the fund on Thursday, Cruz said on Friday, “There were fireworks at an epic level. And I gotta say, it was one of the roughest meetings that I’ve seen in my entire time in the Senate. There were a lot of Republican senators who were just pissed.”

Cruz went on to cite Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) as being quite unhappy with the president over this new fund.

“We have a 53-47 majority,” Cruz stressed. “If you lose four senators, you’re below 50, and you can’t get anything done. That is going to be a complicating factor for the rest of the year.”

He continued:

Fiery does not begin to cut it. The senators I mentioned, they were pissed, but almost every Republican senator was there, so my guess is that there were probably 45 senators in the room. At least half of them were blasting the Attorney General. They were pissed. Basically, the message they said is, ‘You know what, we were gonna pass reconciliation this week, we were gonna fund all of ICE, all of CBP, all of Border Patrol, and then you announced this judgement fund,’ and right now, here’s the challenge.

If [Majority Leader] John Thune [R-SD] had put reconciliation on the floor tonight, the Democrats would have put a bunch of amendments on the floor to unwind the judgment fund, then we would have lost everybody. We wouldn’t have lost it close. It wouldn’t have been 51-49. I gotta tell you, the Republican senators were pissed. People were, the entire meeting, were screaming at the Acting Attorney General.

Watch the full clip above via The Verdict with Ted Cruz on YouTube.

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