Judge Orders Trump Administration to Name Who Created $1.8 Billion Fund

The suit over the “anti-weaponization fund” was filed for a fired prosecutor and a professor acquitted after a California protest.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to disclose who built the $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund.” The order compelling discovery came from Ivan Davis, a U.S. magistrate judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, in a suit brought by the nonprofit Democracy Forward, the Guardian reported. The Justice Department walked away from the fund last month, the outlet reported.

The plaintiffs include a fired prosecutor and a college professor who was acquitted of assaulting federal agents after a protest against an immigration raid in California. They're the ones now asking a court in Virginia to make the government hand over its paperwork. Democrats say the money would have gone in part to January 6 rioters who were prosecuted and later pardoned.

Attorney General Todd Blanche proposed the fund before his confirmation hearing. Last month he said it was finished. “The fund is dead or whatever word you want to use. It never started,” he told Fox News Sunday, in remarks the Guardian recounted.

Blanche also said Trump believes the Justice Department was turned against Americans under the Biden administration, and that the targets paid for it financially.

The compensation plan grew out of a settlement Trump reached with the Internal Revenue Service. That case concerned the leak of his tax returns. The agreement also shielded the president and his family from future audits.

In July, U.S. district judge Kathleen Williams ruled that the two sides in the IRS case had never truly been adverse to each other, that no genuine controversy existed between them, and that Trump's $10 billion claim was there to stand the fund up. She found the suit had been filed for an improper purpose. Her ruling described a settlement with no basis in law or fact, dressed in judicial legitimacy.

Criticism came from both parties in Washington. Republican senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina were among the objectors, and the proposal put Blanche's confirmation in doubt.

Whether the fund can come back is the live question. Critics have said the document lawmakers demanded didn't carry the signatories to the original agreement, which in their reading leaves a route to reviving it. Blanche has said no commissioners were ever running the payout. Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat, said the agreement guaranteed nothing and gave no assurance the fund can't proceed.

Trump hasn't ruled out another way of paying people. “It is dead, but you know, I wish it weren't,” he told his cabinet in July, according to the Guardian. He added that he thought those people had been treated badly.

Aman George, senior counsel at Democracy Forward, said the discovery order brings the group closer to the bottom of the arrangement. He said the organization will keep meeting the government in court until the fund is permanently stopped.

Source: theguardian.com, retrieved September 6, 2026.