DOJ argues anti-weaponization fund is dead, seeks dismissal of legal challenge

In a federal courthouse in Alexandria, Virginia, the Trump administration's lawyer stood before a judge with a simple message: the anti-weaponization fund is finished. No money has moved. No one has been hired to run it. No forms exist for people to file claims. It is, in the words of Andrew J. Block, the senior counsel arguing the case, completely and utterly dead.

The fund itself was meant to be a remedy machine. People who believed the federal government had weaponized its power against them—targeted them unfairly, prosecuted them for improper reasons—could submit claims and receive compensation. The administration framed it as a systematic way to hear grievances and make things right. The nearly $1.8 billion that was supposed to fund it came from an unusual place: a settlement in a lawsuit President Trump filed against his own administration, claiming he deserved $10 billion because a former government contractor had disclosed his tax returns.

But the moment the fund was announced, alarm bells went off among critics. A former assistant U.S. attorney named Andrew Floyd, who had spent years prosecuting people involved in the January 6 Capitol riot, looked at this fund and saw something else entirely: a potential slush fund for insurrectionists. Floyd and several organizations—the National Abortion Federation, Common Cause, and others—filed suit in the Eastern District of Virginia to stop it. Floyd himself had been fired, he contended, precisely because he had prosecuted Trump allies who might now be eligible to collect from this very fund. The lawsuit named Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. as defendants.

The judge overseeing the case, Leonie Brinkema, a Clinton appointee, immediately froze the fund while the legal fight proceeded. She even offered the administration a way out: if Blanche, Woodward, and Bessent would sign sworn declarations—under penalty of perjury—that the fund would never proceed "in any manner, or under any name," she would consider dismissing the lawsuit as moot. The administration refused. They would not sign.

Instead, Block filed a brief arguing the case should be dismissed anyway. The fund is dead, he insisted. There are no mechanisms in place. None of the five people who were supposed to establish and run the fund have even been appointed. No one has submitted a claim because there is nowhere to submit one. The case, he argued, lacks the substance needed to proceed—it is fighting a phantom.

Yet the administration's own statements have muddied this picture. Blanche told Congress the fund was off the table. Then Trump indicated he still wanted it. Blanche testified before Senate lawmakers on Wednesday and said again, under oath, that the plan was dead. "I've said it's dead repeatedly," he told the senators. But the refusal to sign a binding declaration suggested something more complicated was happening behind closed doors.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in Florida struck another blow to the fund's legal foundation. On Monday, that judge voided the settlement agreement between the IRS, Trump, and Blanche, accusing them of attempting to manipulate the judicial process. The fund's legal scaffolding was crumbling.

The Virginia case is set for trial in November, but it must first clear these preliminary hurdles. The question before Judge Brinkema is whether a case can proceed against something the government claims no longer exists—and whether the government's refusal to swear under penalty of perjury that it will never resurrect the fund, in any form, tells a different story than the words being spoken in court.