A DOJ Brief Preposterously Insists That Trump’s ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ Was Politically Neutral

In a brief filed on Friday, Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. argues that a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s brazenly corrupt “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is moot because the Justice Department does not plan to implement the idea. Woodward also notes that the lawsuit, Floyd v. Department of Justice, is based on the premise that the fund was designed to benefit Trump’s supporters, excluding Democrats who claim they were victims of Republican “lawfare and weaponization.” And that, he says, is simply not true.

Trump himself cast doubt on both of those arguments in a Meet the Press interview that aired two days after Woodward filed his brief. The president suggested that the fund, which was part of a May 18 “settlement agreement” that resolved his lawsuit against the IRS, might not be dead after all. And he described the intended beneficiaries as people who “have been hurt so badly by radical-left lunatics” who “worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe.”

As the contrast between Woodward’s arguments in court and Trump’s comments on TV illustrates, the Justice Department’s portrayal of the Anti-Weaponization Fund is completely divorced from reality. Woodward’s description of the fund, which he officially approved by signing the “settlement agreement,” glides over the reasons why it provoked the bipartisan backlash that persuaded Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to ditch the idea two weeks after announcing it.

The pretext for the Anti-Weaponization Fund was a lawsuit in which Trump preposterously claimed that IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn’s illegal leaking of his tax returns had caused “at least” $10 billion in damages. In addition to offering an improbable estimate of the injury he had suffered, Trump missed the statutory deadline for filing such claims. And even if he had filed his lawsuit on time, he would have faced the challenge of showing that the IRS was responsible for the crimes of a man it did not employ.

Despite those legal weaknesses, the Justice Department never mounted a defense. That failure underlined the blatant conflicts of interest created by the lawsuit, which pitted Trump against agencies he oversees in a case where both sides were represented by attorneys who work for him. The situation was so bizarre that Kathleen Williams, the federal judge overseeing the case in the Southern District of Florida, questioned whether it involved a genuine controversy between adverse parties, as required for the lawsuit to proceed.

“Because President Trump is the Chief Executive,” Woodward concedes, his lawsuit against his own administration “presented unique challenges.” That is putting it mildly: If the parties were not truly adverse, which they clearly were not, this was a fake case from the beginning, and any “settlement” arising from it is just as phony.

“Ultimately,” Woodward says, “the federal defendants agreed to resolve the litigation.” That ultimately is doing a lot of work. Why settle a lawsuit that was fatally flawed? Could that decision have something to do with the fact that the lead plaintiff happened to be the boss of the Justice Department lawyers charged with defending the IRS, which they manifestly failed to do?

Woodward does not say. But it is clear that the Justice Department did not treat Trump like other plaintiffs with similar claims. In 2022, Woodward notes, Kenneth Griffin, another billionaire whose tax returns were disclosed by Littlejohn, sued the IRS under 26 USC 7431, the same statute that Trump invoked. Unlike Trump, Griffin filed his lawsuit within two years of learning about the disclosure, as that law requires. Also unlike Trump, Griffin faced Justice Department lawyers who actually challenged his claims.

The Justice Department argued that Littlejohn did not count as a federal employee, another requirement for a Section 7431 claim. The judge declined to dismiss the lawsuit on that basis but indicated that the issue would be addressed in summary judgment proceedings or possibly a trial. He also ruled that Griffin had not adequately alleged a separate claim for damages under the Privacy Act. “Ultimately,” Woodward says, Griffin “settled with the United States for a formal apology.”

Although Trump never had to contend with government lawyers determined to pick apart his claims, he also got an apology. But unlike Griffin, he got a lot more: $1.8 billion in taxpayer money for his allies and supporters, plus blanket protection from liability for tax violations and any other federal offenses he or his family may have committed prior to May 19—a jaw-dropping immunity deal that Blanche revealed the day after he announced the main agreement. Neither arrangement had anything to do with Trump’s claims against the IRS.

Williams never had a chance to review that deal. And because Trump dropped the lawsuit two days before the deadline for briefing on the question of whether it involved a real dispute, she never resolved that crucial issue. But she recently signaled that she plans to revisit the question. On May 29, she ordered the government to address “charges of collusion,” “whether the Parties are truly adverse,” “the assertion that the dismissal in this case was premised on deception by the Parties,” and “the question of whether the case should be reopened because the Court was the ‘victim of a fraud.'”

Woodward does not mention any of that. Nor does he explain the logic that connects the Anti-Weaponization Fund to Trump’s complaint that the IRS failed to properly supervise contractors entrusted with confidential tax information. But as Woodward tells it, the fund was a politically neutral plan to compensate victims of government abuse.

“Plaintiffs’ premise—that hypothetical claimants must have been targeted
by Democrat, rather than Republican, administrations—misreads the plain language of the Settlement Agreement,” Woodward says. “Nothing in the Settlement Agreement would have precluded persons targeted by a Republican administration from submitting a claim. Claimants need only ‘assert at least one legal claim stating that the claimant was a victim of Lawfare and/or Weaponization,’ meaning they were ‘target[ed]…for improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons.”

Other aspects of the “settlement agreement” belie that claim of neutrality. The document describes the Anti-Weaponization Fund as a response to abuse of “government power” by “Democrat elected officials, political and career federal employees, contractors, and agents.” It specifically cites “the Biden Administration’s wrongful labeling of certain parents as domestic terrorists” and “the Biden Administration’s abuse of the FACE Act,” which prohibits obstruction of access to abortion clinics.

The agreement does not mention any abuses by Republican administrations, such as Trump’s vindictive and legally frivolous attempts to imprison his political opponents. As Blanche sees it, there is no problem with that sort of weaponization.

Despite the fund’s framing, Woodward insists that it would have been open to all purported victims of “lawfare and weaponization,” regardless of their ideology or political affiliation. But the process was clearly designed to favor the president’s friends, since the five-member board charged with doling out the money would have been completely under Trump’s control. The board would not have been required to publicly disclose its procedures or decisions, and it would have stopped accepting claims a month and a half before he leaves office.

In case those clues were not enough, Trump made it clear who the intended beneficiaries were. “I am helping others, who were so badly abused by an evil, corrupt, and weaponized Biden Administration, receive, at long last, JUSTICE!” he explained four days after the “settlement” was announced.

Those “others” presumably include the 1,600 or so Trump supporters who were arrested for participating in the 2021 Capitol riot, since Trump already has pardoned them and has frequently described them as victims of government persecution. He reiterated that take during his Meet the Press interview. “The people were destroyed by dirty cops and by weaponization,” he said. “Many of those people should be compensated.”

Trump did not rule out compensation for rioters who were convicted of assaulting police officers—a prospect that angered the Republican legislators who objected to the Anti-Weaponization Fund. “I wouldn’t be inclined to say” those people should receive compensation, he said, “but I have to see it.” He suggested they might in fact have legitimate claims, since “they pled guilty because they were frightened.”

Woodward omits all of this context, without which the political reaction to the fund is inexplicable. The compensation scheme “garnered significant attention and provoked widespread discussion about the weaponization of government, whether and how any claims process should function, and past settlements reached by other administrations,” he blandly reports. “After Plaintiffs filed this case, the political process continued to play out. On June 2, 2026, the Acting Attorney General told Congress that although ‘the reasons for the Fund remain important,’ the Fund is ‘not going forward, period.'”

Trump seemed to contradict that assurance during the Meet the Press interview, suggesting that the fund could be revived in some form. “I think the weaponization fund is a great idea, and so do many other Republicans,” he said. “You have to get it approved. If they get it approved, that’s great. If they don’t get it approved, I’d be disappointed.”

Woodward nevertheless may be right that the lawsuit challenging the fund, which was filed in the Eastern District of Virginia on May 22, no longer involves a genuine “case or controversy.” He may also be right that the plaintiffs—a former federal prosecutor, the city of New Haven, Common Cause, and the National Abortion Federation—never had standing to sue. And he persuasively argues that their First Amendment and equal protection claims are unlikely to succeed.

Woodward’s description of the “settlement agreement,” by contrast, is so misleading that a reader unfamiliar with the controversy it provoked would be puzzled as to why the Trump administration abandoned this seemingly fine idea. It is pretty clear why Woodward does not want to get into all of that, since the explanation would implicate him in a scam. Under the pretext of a phony lawsuit, Trump extracted benefits for himself, his family, and his supporters. That would not have been possible without the eager assistance of government attorneys who abandoned legal ethics in their rush to please the president.