WASHINGTON — Donald Trump has been trying to set aside 1.8 billion dollars of public money to compensate the people who stormed the United States Capitol on his behalf. On Friday, for a second time, a federal judge told him he cannot, at least not yet, and not without swearing to it under oath.
Judge Leonie Brinkema, of the federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, issued an injunction halting the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund and gave the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, and the Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, one week to file sworn declarations, on penalty of perjury, that the fund will not move forward, CNBC reported. Until those papers arrive, the money stays frozen.
The fund’s origins are as remarkable as its purpose. It was carved out of the settlement of a 10 billion dollar lawsuit Trump himself had brought against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax records, an arrangement critics warned could place his own businesses beyond the reach of federal tax scrutiny. The president sued the government, the government settled, and the settlement seeded a pot of public money for the president to distribute.
Who would receive it is the heart of the controversy. The Justice Department, which announced the fund in May, said it would compensate people it deemed victims of prosecutorial overreach under the Biden administration, a category that expressly includes those charged over the January 6 attack on the Capitol, the roughly 1,500 of whom Trump pardoned on his first day back in office. The fund would turn his pardoned supporters into paid ones.
What undid the administration in court was the president’s own mouth. The judge pointed to Trump’s public insistence that the weaponization fund is a great idea, and to his remark on NBC’s Meet the Press that, if it were up to him, he would pay the January 6 defendants the kind of money that they deserve. Those words, Brinkema said, carry a lot of weight, and amount to a pretty good indicator that the administration still intends to make the fund happen, ABC News reported.
That distrust is why the judge wants sworn statements rather than verbal assurances. Blanche had declined to commit in writing that the fund was dead, and the court was unwilling to take the matter on faith from officials whose boss keeps championing the very thing they say they have abandoned. A signature under penalty of perjury raises the cost of changing course later.
For all the legal machinery, the fund is the plainest illustration of how this administration has bent the apparatus of government toward Trump’s own ends. His lawsuit produced the money; his Justice Department designed the payouts; his pardoned supporters stand to collect. It belongs to the same pattern as the lawsuits in which his Justice Department has gone on the offensive against states that resist him, and it proved so brazen that even Senate Republicans recoiled when it first surfaced.
For now the 1.8 billion dollars stays where it is, its fate resting on whether two of the most senior officials in the government are willing to put their names to a promise their president keeps undercutting. What hangs on their answer is whether the public will be made to pay the people who attacked its Capitol. A judge, for the moment, has said it will not.
