The president himself has repeatedly refuted that assertion.
In a Friday filing, Associate Attorney General Stanley E. Woodward Jr. contends that a lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s audaciously corrupt “Anti-Weaponization Fund” should be considered moot since the Justice Department has no intention of putting the scheme into effect. Woodward adds that Floyd v. Department of Justice rests on the assumption that the fund was meant to benefit Trump’s backers while excluding Democrats who claim they suffered from Republican “lawfare and weaponization.” And he asserts that this premise is false.
Trump undermined both points in a Meet the Press appearance aired two days after Woodward’s filing. He hinted that the fund, embedded in a May 18 settlement agreement settling his suit against the IRS, could still be alive in some form. He characterized the intended recipients as individuals who “have been hurt so badly by radical-left lunatics” who “worked for the Biden administration and Sleepy Joe.”
The contrast between Woodward’s courtroom assertions and Trump’s televised remarks demonstrates that the Justice Department’s portrayal of the Anti-Weaponization Fund bears little relation to reality. Woodward’s depiction of the fund, which he formally endorsed by signing the “settlement,” glosses over the reasons that sparked bipartisan opposition strong enough to persuade Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche to abandon the proposal just two weeks after its announcement.
The justification behind the Anti-Weaponization Fund rested on a case in which Trump absurdly claimed that IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn’s unlawful disclosure of his tax records had caused “at least” $10 billion in damages. Besides presenting an unlikely damage figure, Trump also missed the legal deadline for filing such claims. And even if he had filed on time, he would have had to prove the IRS bore responsibility for crimes committed by a man it did not employ.
Despite these legal shortcomings, the Department never mounted a defense. That lapse underscored the blatant conflicts of interest created by the suit, which pitted Trump against agencies he supervises in a matter where the opposing sides were represented by lawyers employed by him. The episode was so peculiar that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, who oversaw the Florida case, questioned whether there was a true dispute between adverse parties, a prerequisite for the case to move forward.
“Because President Trump is the Chief Executive,” Woodward concedes, the suit against his own administration “presented unique challenges.” That’s an understatement: if the parties were not truly opposing interests, which they evidently were not, the case was a sham from the start, and any ‘settlement’ stemming from it would be equally counterfeit.
“Ultimately,” Woodward notes, “the federal defendants consented to resolve the litigation.” That ‘ultimately’ carries heavy weight. Why settle a lawsuit that was fatally flawed? Could the decision reflect that the lead plaintiff happened to be the head of the Justice Department’s lawyers responsible for defending the IRS, whom they demonstrably failed to defend adequately?
Woodward does not state that. Yet it is evident the DOJ did not treat Trump as other plaintiffs with comparable claims. In 2022, Woodward notes, Kenneth Griffin—another billionaire whose tax data Littlejohn disclosed—sued the IRS under 26 USC 7431, the same statute Trump cited. Unlike Trump, Griffin filed within the two-year window after discovering the disclosure, per the statute. And unlike Trump, Griffin was opposed by DOJ lawyers who actively contested his assertions.
The DOJ argued Littlejohn was not a federal employee, another element for a Section 7431 claim. The judge did not dismiss on that ground but signaled the issue would be resolved in summary judgment or at trial. He also found that Griffin had not properly alleged a separate Privacy Act damages claim. “Ultimately,” Woodward says, Griffin “settled with the United States for a formal apology.”
Though Trump avoided facing government lawyers intent on dissecting his allegations, he did receive an apology. But unlike Griffin, his package was far larger: $1.8 billion in public funds allocated to his allies and supporters, along with broad immunity from liability for tax violations and any other federal offenses he or his relatives might have committed before May 19—a stunning immunity pledge that Blanche disclosed the day after the core agreement was announced. Neither provision related to Trump’s claims about the IRS.
Judge Williams never had an opportunity to review the agreement. And since Trump withdrew the suit two days before the briefing deadline on whether a real dispute existed, she did not settle that central issue. Yet she has lately indicated an intention to reexamine the matter. On May 29, she instructed the government to address allegations of collusion, whether the Parties are genuinely adverse, the claim that the case’s dismissal rested on deception by the Parties, and whether the case should be reopened because the Court was ‘the victim of a fraud.’
Woodward omits all of that. He also does not justify the link between the Anti-Weaponization Fund and Trump’s grievance about the IRS’s supervision of contractors handling confidential tax data. Yet, in his account, the fund was a politically neutral scheme intended 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 Trump 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.
