WASHINGTON – Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is denying he privately told senators he “made a mistake” by setting up his department’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to give payouts to Jan. 6 rioters, even as two Democratic senators say he told them directly he regretted setting up the slush fund.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, shared this detail with reporters last Tuesday, right after leaving a meeting with Blanche. He and one of his senior aides, who also attended the meeting, even said it was a direct quote.

But buried in more than 400 pages of Blanche’s written responses to questions from the committee, where he’s currently awaiting a vote to be officially confirmed to his post, Blanche denies he ever said that. He submitted his responses to committee members’ questions last Friday, but the panel just made them public this week.

“In our meeting this week, you said, ‘I made a mistake’ by creating this slush fund,” Durbin says on Page 8. “Do you stand by this characterization of this slush fund?”

“I contest the accuracy of this statement,” Blanche replied.

It’s a strange point to dispute, considering Durbin sat down with reporters and discussed this exchange in detail last week. Asked Wednesday about Blanche denying he made those comments, the Illinois senator just chuckled.

“I verified it with several of my staffers who were present,” said Durbin. “I stand by it.”

He speculated that Blanche is publicly disputing that he called Trump’s fund “a mistake” because “that’s not proper MAGA talk.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), also a member of the judiciary panel, said Blanche said the same thing to him, too, when they met privately last week.

“He said it to me in my office,” he told HuffPost. “He acknowledged that it was a mistake. He said, basically, he took the blame for it.”

A Justice Department spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Blanche appears to be trying to have it both ways when he talks about his fund that crashed and burned in Congress: privately distancing himself from it to try to win over Senate votes for his confirmation, while publicly standing by it to keep Trump happy.

Blanche, who previously served as Trump’s personal attorney, created the Justice Department’s fund in May. He issued a memo instructing the Treasury Department to dump $1.776 billion in taxpayer money into an account for payouts to people claiming they were unfairly targeted by the government, effectively setting up a compensation fund for Jan. 6 rioters and the president’s political allies.

The idea for it was borne out of corruption. In January, Trump sued the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service — both agencies he oversees — for $10 billion after a contractor leaked his personal tax information to the press. Instead of heading into litigation, Trump and the Justice Department, which is also under his thumb, ultimately reached a settlement that included the creation of this fund.

But Trump’s efforts to get Congress to appropriate money for it were met with outcry by the public and fierce opposition by lawmakers in both parties. Senate Republicans ultimately forced the president to ditch the fund in June, and Blanche has since called it dead.

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has been finding other ways to pay out Jan. 6 rioters.

On Wednesday, Blumenthal said the reason the slush fund even came up in his meeting with Blanche is because he made the point that Trump thought it “was a great idea.” Blanche responded by saying, in fact, it was his mistake.

“It will be known as the Blanche Slush Fund,” the senator recalled him saying. “He was taking responsibility for it. He was not proud of it, in other words.”

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