A federal judge aired doubts Friday that President Donald Trump’s $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund is as dead as the Justice Department has insisted it is.
“The issues that underlie this case are still alive and kicking, in my view,” U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Virginia said at a hearing.
Brinkema seemed skeptical of the government’s bid to throw out a lawsuit challenging the fund and a related tax-immunity deal for Trump and his family on the grounds that the case is moot.
The judge didn’t rule on the government’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit, saying an order could come in the near future. But she indicated she wasn’t convinced that administration officials had fully abandoned the fund — or, at least the idea of steering taxpayer money to people claiming to have been unfairly targeted by federal authorities.
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The Justice Department created the fund in May under a highly unusual settlement in a separate case in Florida between Trump, the DOJ and the IRS over the leak of Trump’s tax returns years earlier. The federal judge in the Florida case recently rebuked the agreement as the product of collusion among the parties and manipulation of the legal process to benefit Trump and his allies.
The fund was designed to compensate people who claimed they were wrongfully investigated or prosecuted, a group that lawmakers and legal advocates argued could include people who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot. The immunity deal also purported to insulate Trump, his family and businesses from tax liabilities.
Attorney General Todd Blanche repeatedly said the fund was not moving forward following rulings from multiple judges against blocking the settlement, at least temporarily, and after scrutiny from Democrats and Republicans in Congress.
“It’s dead,” Blanche told lawmakers at his Senate confirmation hearing in July. He followed up with a two-page order in August claiming to rescind the fund and modify the agreement.
In court Friday, Brinkema said she was satisfied that the fund itself “now is gone” after hearing Blanche’s congressional testimony. But she questioned, as she has throughout the litigation, whether the Trump administration could create a “functional equivalent” of the fund through another mechanism.
She zeroed in on the possibility that the administration could use the federal Judgment Fund, which pays court judgments and settlements against the government, to compensate people the administration favors.
She appeared to allude to a recent payout the Justice Department made to an anti-abortion activist who was convicted during the Biden administration of blocking access to an abortion clinic. The activist, Paul Vaughn, received a seven-figure settlement in July. He had been pardoned by Trump while his case was on appeal.
“This concept of taxpayer money being used to promote particular political viewpoints,” the judge said, “that’s the gravamen, as I understand it.”
She also said administration officials had contradicted Blanche’s assurances that the fund was not proceeding. Trump has said he wished the fund could continue, and Blanche has defended the underlying idea of redressing what he called “victims of a Department of Justice that was absolutely weaponized.”
At one point, Brinkema balked at a suggestion by DOJ attorney Andrew Block that there was no remedy for the plaintiffs to seek in the case. Brinkema floated the idea of requiring a “neutral” official, outside the Justice Department, to oversee the Judgment Fund and ensure payouts are handled properly.
But she said the litigation was nowhere near that stage.
Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy group, filed the lawsuit challenging the fund in May. The plaintiffs include a former federal prosecutor who handled several Jan. 6 cases.
Two rulings by Brinkema over the summer blocked the Trump administration from implementing the fund while the litigation proceeds.
Democracy Forward later added new plaintiffs and allegations to the case calling the tax-immunity deal unlawful. They argue the deal will put IRS employees in an “untenable position by compelling them to carry out unlawful orders” to terminate tax audits. Part of Friday’s hearing involved whether IRS employees from the Treasury Department’s union have the legal right to join the lawsuit.
In their motion to dismiss, DOJ lawyers said the lawsuit isn’t viable because it targets an anti-weaponization fund that “has never existed and will not exist.”
They also argued that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing to challenge Trump’s immunity deal, which the DOJ described as a “third-party settlement agreement to a civil action in another district with which they have a policy disagreement.”
“The Justice Department and Attorney General have now said countless times, in public, to this Court in briefs, and to Congress in sworn testimony, that the idea of the Anti-Weaponization Fund at the heart of this case is dead and will not go forward,” they wrote. “The time has come to stop this inquisition.”
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