A top staffer at the Department of Justice asked to recuse himself from work related to Donald Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” so he could cash in on it. The sudden request from Patrick Davis, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs, concerned his colleagues because he’d been charged with liaising with Congress in order to set up the president’s slush fund, according to two administration officials who spoke to Politico. “[Davis] has relationships with the senators, and it was a very tough time for him to back out,” one of the officials told Politico. “In a very fraught moment, with legislative affairs and stuff with the Hill, DOJ needed to have the head of leg. affairs involved.”Davis’s potential claim to taxpayer dollars relates to his prior work as Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley’s top investigative counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee. Davis was one of dozens of congressional aides whose phone and email records were quietly subpoenaed during the investigation into alleged Russian interference, following the 2016 presidential election. Davis only discovered the subpoena years later. “It felt like a violation, not simply on a personal level, but more importantly of the separation of powers given the nature of our oversight work,” Davis previously told The New York Times. The two administration officials told Politico that Davis didn’t have a valid reason to recuse himself because the fund hadn’t been formally set up, and Davis would have been useful in preparing acting Attorney General Todd Blanche before he appeared on Capitol Hill to answer questions about the fund.“It was a hard issue and he just didn’t want to deal with it and didn’t want to be there to address the difficult conversations,” one official told Politico. “The thing was a cop-out.”A DOJ spokesperson told Politico that Davis had temporarily recused himself “out of an abundance of caution,” and it was later determined that the recusal was not necessary for “a number of reasons.” Earlier this month, Blanche confirmed that plans for the fund are dead, but he and Trump have continued to rave about the idea. More about the fund:Other members of President Trump’s Cabinet began to consider Vice President JD Vance a “conspiracy theorist” as he pushed for the release of the Epstein files and an interview with Ghislaine Maxwell in the midst of their panicked attempt to snuff out the biggest controversy of Trump’s second term.New reporting from The New York Times reveals that while the Cabinet remained staunch in their public defense of Trump, there was chaos behind the scenes last year over Trump’s deep connections to the sexual predator. Vance played a large role in the internal discord, as he seemed to be the loudest voice pushing “the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class”—leading White House chief of staff Susie Wiles to call him a major conspiracy theorist.When Trump’s Cabinet learned that The Wall Street Journal was set to publish its story on Trump’s birthday letter to Epstein, the team met in the Situation Room to discuss their options. Vance pushed for the administration to fully release the files quickly, suggesting that they have Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell either do an interview with Tucker Carlson or testify before Congress. In Vance’s mind, this would solidify Trump’s alibi and secure confidence with their MAGA base—which happened to care very much about the Epstein files. Both plans were struck down, and the team pointed out that Maxwell would want something in return. “Pardoning Maxwell, a trafficker of young girls, would create a huge P.R. problem,” communications director Steven Cheung argued. “We can’t offer Ghislaine Maxwell anything,” said White House deputy chief of staff James Blair. “A, I don’t know why we would. And B, if we give Ghislaine Maxwell any sort of break whatsoever and then she turns around and says nice things about us, or says nice things about us and we give her a break, it will undermine the entire point of her saying good things. That will feed the conspiracy theory, period. If there’s nothing for her to say that hurts us, we shouldn’t have to offer her anything.”The report makes it abundantly clear that there was no consensus on how to handle the political tsunami of the Epstein files, as it also details the falling out between former Attorney General Pam Bondi, former FBI Co–Deputy Director Dan Bongino, and FBI Director Kash Patel. The drama between them came to a head after a tumultuous few months in which Bondi went from claiming she had Epstein’s client list sitting on her desk to handing out big white binders to MAGA influencers, to then claiming there was essentially nothing new in the files. “You fucked this thing up from the start,” Bongino screamed at her, a day after the DOJ memo claiming there was nothing more in the files to be released. “The way you’ve been talking about this—that dumb fucking charade with the Epstein files, the ‘They’re on my desk’ nonsense, all the promises to the folks out there.”While it’s unclear where Vance stands among Trump and the rest of the Cabinet now, it’s clear that he’ll have to answer for the internal decisions made last summer for the entirety of his political career.More on this story:Possible Republican cuts to Social Security was too controversial of an issue for one member of Congress to handle. Republican