A federal judge in Virginia on Friday indefinitely barred President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund from moving forward and said she would give administration officials one week to provide a written guarantee that it is dead.
U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema said she was not convinced by the Justice Department’s assertions that the fund — which was designed to compensate people who claimed to have been unfairly targeted by federal authorities — would not proceed.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche testified to Congress this month that the administration would scrap the fund following uproar from lawmakers over the money potentially being used to compensate people who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. But Blanche declined to say as much in writing, and Trump continued to publicly defend the fund.
In court Friday morning, Brinkema said she had not seen enough evidence “to guarantee this fund may not rear its head in some other guise.”
Trending
Her ruling grants a request for a preliminary injunction by the advocacy group Democracy Forward, which sued on behalf of several plaintiffs — including a former federal prosecutor who handled Jan. 6 cases — to halt work on the fund.
Brinkema said she would likely drop the case if the government filed a “clear, unambiguous” declaration signed by Blanche and affirmed under penalty of perjury that the fund was permanently canceled. If that doesn’t arrive within a week, she said, the case would proceed as normal.
The judge’s order came a little more than a week after she temporarily blocked the fund while considering arguments from the parties. The Justice Department had said it would comply with that order.
Skye Perryman, the president of Democracy Forward, called the ruling Friday “a significant victory for the Constitution, the rule of law, and people in America.”
“Despite the administration’s shifting explanations about the future of the slush fund, the court’s order ensures that taxpayer dollars cannot be distributed through this unlawful scheme while the courts fully consider the serious constitutional issues at stake,” Perryman said in a statement.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment and pointed to earlier remarks by Trump and Blanche about the fund not continuing. A Justice Department spokesperson said in response that “there is no fund.”
The Justice Department established the fund in May as part of an agreement resolving a $10 billion lawsuit Trump and his sons brought against the IRS over the leak of their tax returns.
The fund drew a chorus of criticism from Democrats and Republicans in Congress who questioned its legality and voiced alarm about the possibility of sending payments to Jan. 6 defendants with virtually no oversight.
Democracy Forward filed a lawsuit in May, arguing the fund created an unconstitutional and “politically discriminatory” claims process. The lead plaintiff is former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Floyd, who prosecuted several Jan. 6 cases.
Brinkema’s ruling came two days after U.S. District Judge Richard Leon in Washington declined to block the fund in a separate lawsuit, saying the case appeared to be moot.
During Friday’s hearing, Brinkema pressed a government lawyer, Andrew Block, about why he was unable to explain to the judge in that case why Blanche hadn’t simply rescinded the Justice Department order creating the fund.
She asked if he had an answer now.
“Your honor, I don’t,” Block said.
Brinkema appeared skeptical. “I cannot believe, given the significance of this case, you didn’t discuss it with somebody in a supervisory role,” she said.
Block responded that he would be “speculating” if he spoke further and noted again that Blanche had directed the fund not to move forward.
“I don’t have an answer for why that particular paper wasn’t rescinded,” he said.
Brinkema said that Trump’s remarks about the fund and the lack of a sworn statement from Blanche could leave the door open for the fund to be revived in some capacity. She also noted that some law firms appeared to be accepting applications from people “who think this fund is up and running.”
Toward the end of the hearing, Brinkema took the unusual step of reading directly from a friend-of-the-court brief filed by Sens. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who called the fund an “end-run around Congress’s institutional authority.”
She quoted from a section discussing possible payments to Capitol rioters that said the fund risked using “the machinery of democratic government to subsidize an attack on that government’s most fundamental processes.”
This story has been updated to include a comment from the Justice Department.
Author
