A federal judge in Virginia has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from moving ahead with plans to create a nearly $1.8 billion fund to compensate people who it says were wrongly targeted by the government in the past.
The brief order from US District Judge Leonie Brinkema says the administration cannot take any action “pursuant to the creation or operation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund, which includes the transferring of money to the Fund; the consideration of any claims submitted to the Fund; and the disbursing of any funds from the Fund.”
She set a hearing for June 12 to hear arguments over whether she should issue a more lasting pause on the government’s efforts to set up the fund, which is being challenged by a diverse coalition of critics and entities who say they’ve been targeted by the Trump administration and are ineligible to receive money from it.
Brinkema, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton, said she was pausing work on the fund for now to maintain the status quo while she considers the legal challenge. She pointed to the fact that the Justice Department had not committed to holding off on transferring money into it or processing payments while initial court proceedings played out.
She asked the Justice Department to submit written legal arguments in the case by next Friday.
The case is one of several brought in the last week against the controversial fund, which was unveiled earlier this month after Trump settled an unprecedented lawsuit he had brought against the Internal Revenue Service.
The fund, which will be run by five commissioners selected by the attorney general, will review claims submitted by people who say they were unfairly targeted by previous administrations. The massive pot of money is being drawn from the DOJ’s Judgment Fund, which is taxpayer money set aside by Congress for monetary settlements the government reaches.
Under the terms of the settlement, acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was required to appoint the commissioners within 30 days. He told CNN in an interview last week that “a bunch of people” had applied to sit on the commission. But Brinkema’s order appears to put a hold on his ability to search for those commissioners.
In the case at hand, a group of people and organizations — including a former federal prosecutor, a prominent government watchdog group and the city of New Haven, Connecticut — argue the fund is unconstitutional and violates a series of federal laws.
They specifically challenge the Trump administration’s decision to draw from the Judgment Fund for the new program, arguing it’s unlawful because the underlying legal case was “meritless” given the president’s unique role as both a plaintiff and head of the executive branch, which is where the agencies he sued are housed.
Their lawyers told the judge, whose courthouse is in Alexandria, Virginia, that she needed to step in now because they’re “already being irreparably harmed by the unconstitutional and unlawful creation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
They pointed to the fact that under the terms of the settlement and Blanche’s order establishing the fund, much of the program is shielded from public view, making it difficult to know how much work has been done on it and whether any funds have gone out the door.
“Today, a federal court recognized the urgent need to prevent taxpayer dollars from being distributed through a secretive and unprecedented political compensation scheme before the legality of that program can be fully reviewed by the court,” said Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a legal advocacy group representing the plaintiffs in the case.
In a statement, the Justice Department says it believes the fund is legal.
“The Department remains extremely confident in the legality of the Anti-Weaponization Fund which is supported by ample precedent, including Obama-era settlements,” DOJ said. “We will not allow the policy preferences of judges to interfere with our efforts to provide restitution to victims of lawfare.”
“And that harm will be permanent if the administration takes action, including by irreversibly disbursing funds, before this court can act,” they wrote in court papers filed Thursday.
Trump must defend IRS deal against fraud accusations
Friday afternoon, the federal judge who was overseeing Trump’s unprecedented lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service ordered him to respond to claims that he committed “fraud” on the court warranting an inquiry into potential wrongdoing by both sides.
US District Judge Kathleen Williams directed Trump, his adult sons and the Trump Organization to respond by June 12 to accusations raised this week by nearly three dozen former federal judges that they acted in a collusive manner with the Justice Department lawyers representing the IRS to reach an out-of-court settlement.
“A court is empowered to investigate serious misconduct,” Williams, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, wrote in a four-page order issued Friday afternoon. “If a party files a lawsuit for an improper purpose, ‘the court may impose an appropriate sanction on the responsible party.’”
She instructed Trump to detail his position on “the charges of collusion” and whether he was “truly adverse” with the IRS and other government defendants in the case and “the question of whether the case should be reopened because the court was the ‘victim of a fraud.’”
The directive comes two days after a group of federal judges appointed by presidents from both parties asked Williams to reopen the case, which she formally closed last week, to look into whether she “was deceived, including with respect to the existence of an underlying case or controversy and any purported arms-length negotiations undertaken to resolve it.”
