The Justice Department told two federal judges on Friday that cases challenging President Donald Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund” are moot because the administration has abandoned the program.
The filings represent the first time the Trump administration has said in writing that it was no longer pursuing the fund, which was met with widespread criticism before acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said earlier this week that it was being killed. A federal judge has already blocked work on the fund.
DOJ’s arguments come after Senate Republicans rejected multiple legislative attempts to kill it despite bipartisan concerns it would serve as a slush fund for Trump’s allies. Some members, including key Republicans, raised concerns that the fund lacks guardrails.
Lawmakers were particularly concerned that payouts would go to rioters, including those who assaulted police officers, during the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, which the Trump administration didn’t immediately rule out.
Here’s where things stand:
It’s dead, Blanche and DOJ insist
Last week, a federal judge in Virginia temporarily blocked the administration from taking steps to set up the fund and barred it from releasing any funds from it. But that ruling was highly technical: It didn’t address the legality of the program but was instead intended to get the court time to review a lawsuit seeking to kill the program in full.
In filings Friday submitted to judges in Washington, DC, and Virginia reviewing challenges to the fund, DOJ attorneys pointed to those comments from Blanche and said that the cases no longer belonged in court since the fund “is now not going forward.”
“The equities and the public interest do not favor this court interjecting itself in a political process to shut down a fund that is already not going forward,” DOJ told US District Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia.
“(T)he fund has been the subject of vigorous public debate,” DOJ added. “That process may seem messy. But the push-and-pull of such debate is a feature of our constitutional republic.”
Challengers couldn’t sue anyway, DOJ says
In the filings Friday, Justice Department lawyers told the two judges that the challengers in the cases, which include individuals, cities, organizations and government watchdog groups, had pushed dubious legal claims against the fund.
They leaned especially hard into an argument that the plaintiffs lacked the legal right – known as “standing” – to bring the cases in the first place because, they say, the challengers could not show how they were being harmed by the fund.
In the case before Brinkema, which was brought by people and groups who say they would be ineligible to make claims to the fund because they were targeted by the Trump administration, the Justice Department said they were misreading the language of the settlement that gave rise to the program.
“Plaintiffs’ requested relief (shutting down the non-existent Fund) … would not remedy their claimed injury (exclusion from the non-existent Fund),” DOJ wrote. “It would leave them in the exact same position they claimed to be in when they filed their complaint, and which they are in now that the Fund is not going forward: unable to obtain relief from the Fund.”
Senate politics
In the meantime this week, the issue created a rift among Republicans in Congress with some stalling on considering an immigration funding bill until the White House committed to dropping the compensation fund.
In an attempt to convince Congress to vote for the immigration bill, Blanche told House lawmakers on Tuesday that the Justice Department will not be “moving forward with the fund, period.”
Democratic Rep. Grace Meng then asked, “Not moving forward, ever?” to which Blanche responded, “Correct.”
Ultimately, Republicans didn’t want to derail one of Trump’s key legislative priorities, and advanced the immigration bill without any language formally killing the fund early Friday after hours of talks between GOP leaders and Republican holdouts. Only one Republican – Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski – voted against the final bill.
Meanwhile, Trump has not been so unequivocal, giving mixed signals about the future of the fund.
Trump, a day after Blanche’s vow to lawmakers, said that he doesn’t know if the fund is dead, which has led to confusion about its status.
“I’d have to ask the lawyers, I don’t know,” he said when asked whether the fund is fully dead or just on hold. “As far as I’m concerned, it was a beautiful thing.”
The fund is a result of a settlement between the Internal Revenue Service and Trump, two of his sons and the Trump Organization, after the president dropped his $10 billion lawsuit alleging that the IRS failed to protect them from an unauthorized leak of their tax returns.
Trump himself would not receive any payments, but will receive a formal apology, the Justice Department has said.
This story was updated following the Justice Department filings on Friday afternoon.
CNN’s Aileen Graef, Sarah Ferris, Lauren Fox, Manu Raju, Ted Barrett, Alison Main, Adam Cancryn, Kaitlan Collins, Hannah Rabinowitz, Tierney Sneed, Casey Gannon, and Paula Reid contributed to this report.
