Gordon v. Blanche: Prosecutors Sue to Kill the Anti-Weaponization Fund
This is a complaint — the opening shot of a civil lawsuit, the document that starts a case. Think of it as the plaintiffs’ opening statement to the judge: here is who we are, here is what was done to us, here is why it was illegal, and here is what we want you to do about it.
The plaintiffs are not asking for money damages. They are asking the court to (1) declare the Anti-Weaponization Fund illegal — an official judicial statement that it shouldn’t exist — and (2) enjoin (that is, order) the government to stop creating and funding it. An injunction is one of the most powerful tools a federal court has: it is a court order that can freeze government action in its tracks while a case proceeds.
This is a significant, carefully constructed lawsuit, filed by four law firms simultaneously, including the Democracy Defenders Fund and a team led by Matthew Platkin, the former Attorney General of New Jersey. The complaint runs 51 pages and raises nine separate legal claims. Assistance from Claude AI.
Case: Gordon v. Blanche, No. 1:26-cv-01907 (D.D.C., filed June 1, 2026)
Document Type: Civil Complaint for Injunctive and Declaratory Relief
The Parties
Plaintiffs:
- Michael M. Gordon — A former federal prosecutor who joined the Capitol Siege Section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia in 2021 and served as Senior Trial Counsel, prosecuting more than three dozen January 6 defendants. He was fired by the DOJ in June 2025 in what the complaint characterizes as political retaliation.
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Michael J. Romano — An 18-year federal prosecutor who rose to become a Deputy Chief of the Capitol Siege Section, overseeing hundreds of January 6 prosecutions and signing nearly every indictment the section brought. He resigned in March 2025 under pressure and fear of retaliation after Trump’s DOJ began targeting Capitol Siege Section prosecutors.
Defendants (all sued in their official capacities):
- Todd Blanche — Acting Attorney General of the United States, and formerly Donald Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney in his New York hush-money trial.
- Stanley E. Woodward, Jr. — Associate Attorney General, who signed the settlement agreement at the center of this case.
- Scott Bessent — Secretary of the Treasury.
- Frank J. Bisignano — Chief Executive Officer of the IRS, who also signed the settlement agreement.
- The Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury, and the Internal Revenue Service as institutional defendants.
The Background: What Happened Here
To understand this lawsuit, you need to understand the chain of events that led to it. The complaint tells a story that moves in four acts.
Act One: January 6, 2021 and the Prosecutions That Followed
The complaint recounts the January 6 Capitol riot and the prosecution effort that followed. Gordon and Romano spent years doing the painstaking work of building criminal cases against the roughly 1,500 people who stormed the Capitol. They prosecuted people who brought weapons, assaulted police officers, and led coordinated efforts to stop the certification of the 2020 election. The Capitol Siege Section ultimately obtained guilty pleas or convictions from the vast majority of those charged.
Act Two: Trump’s Sustained Campaign to Delegitimize the Prosecutions
Beginning in 2021 and escalating through the 2024 campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly and publicly characterized the January 6 prosecutions as politically motivated “weaponization” of the justice system. He called the defendants “political prisoners,” then upgraded the rhetoric to “hostages.” He promised pardons. The complaint catalogs this campaign in detail — tweets, Truth Social posts, rally speeches — establishing that the narrative of prosecutorial misconduct was deliberate, sustained, and central to Trump’s political identity.
On his first day back in office, January 20, 2025, Trump delivered on the pardon promise, issuing clemency to approximately 1,500 January 6 defendants. He simultaneously issued an executive order titled “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” which explicitly named the January 6 prosecutions as an example of political abuse.
The DOJ then created a “Weaponization Working Group” to investigate, among other things, whether the January 6 prosecutions were improper. Notably, that group was headed by Ed Martin — a man who had previously represented January 6 defendants as a defense attorney, and who demoted and fired Capitol Siege Section prosecutors before taking the role. A newly pardoned January 6 rioter named Jared Wise, who on the day of the insurrection had urged fellow rioters to “kill” police officers, was named as an adviser to the group.
Gordon was fired in June 2025. Romano had already resigned in March 2025.
Act Three: Trump Sues Himself
Here is where the story takes a turn that even by the standards of recent American political life is remarkable.
In January 2026, President Trump, his two adult sons, and the Trump Organization filed a lawsuit in federal court in Florida against the IRS and the Department of the Treasury. They claimed $10 billion in damages stemming from the leak of Trump’s tax returns by an IRS contractor named Charles Littlejohn.
The complaint in this case calls the Florida lawsuit “extraordinary” — and it was, in multiple ways. First, a sitting president was suing federal agencies he himself directs and controls. Second, the $10 billion figure was wildly inflated. Third, the suit was almost certainly time-barred: the relevant statutes have two-year limitations periods, and Trump’s own attorney had appeared at Littlejohn’s guilty plea in October 2023, making clear that Trump knew of the disclosure at that point — yet the suit wasn’t filed until more than two years later, in January 2026. Fourth, the suit named the wrong defendants: Littlejohn was a contractor, not a government employee, and the relevant statute only creates liability for government employees.
Despite all of this, no DOJ attorney ever entered an appearance to defend the government — the agencies’ own lawyers declined to contest the case. The parties quickly signaled they were in settlement discussions.
The court in Florida noticed something was off. In an April 2026 order, the judge observed that it was “unclear” whether the parties were “sufficiently adverse to each other so as to satisfy Article III’s case or controversy requirement.” The judge cited Trump’s own statements to the press — including that he was “supposed to work out a settlement with myself” and that “I’ll tell them to pay me, but I’ll give 100% of the money to charity.”
Article III is the section of the Constitution that establishes the federal courts, and it limits the judiciary to deciding actual “cases or controversies” — real disputes between genuinely adverse parties. A judge cannot adjudicate a case staged by two sides who are secretly on the same team. The Florida court ordered briefing on whether any such case or controversy actually existed, and appointed outside lawyers (amici curiae — friends of the court) to address the question.
Two days before that briefing was due, Trump settled with himself. The case was dismissed on May 18, 2026.
Act Four: The Anti-Weaponization Fund
The dismissal was accompanied by the public release of a settlement agreement, signed by Woodward and Bisignano, dated the same day. The agreement obligated the DOJ to create the “Anti-Weaponization Fund.”
The fund is extraordinary in design and scope:
- It is capitalized with $1,776,000,000 — a figure the complaint notes is transparently symbolic, since January 6 rioters referred to the insurrection as “a new 1776.”
- It will pay claims from anyone who asserts they were harmed by “Lawfare and Weaponization,” which the agreement defines as harm caused by “Democrat elected officials, political and career federal employees, contractors, and agents” — explicitly limited to Democratic-era conduct.
- Its five members are appointed by the Attorney General, not the President, without Senate confirmation.
- It can issue formal government apologies on behalf of the United States.
- Its procedures need not be made public.
- Its decisions are unreviewable — no appeals, no arbitration, no judicial review.
The day after the settlement was announced, the DOJ released an addendum granting Trump and his family broad immunity from future government enforcement actions, reportedly eliminating a potential IRS liability of more than $100 million.
Enrique Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader sentenced to 22 years for seditious conspiracy in connection with January 6, announced he would apply to the fund and expected to receive between $2 million and $5 million. January 6 defendants flooded social media with plans to apply.
The Legal Claims
The complaint raises nine separate counts. They cluster into four main areas.
1. The Fund Was Not Authorized by Law
The government is relying on the Judgment Fund — a permanent congressional appropriation that allows Treasury to pay final judgments and compromise settlements against the United States without going back to Congress for specific appropriations each time. It is the government’s standard mechanism for paying out court-ordered money.
The complaint argues the Judgment Fund cannot be used here for multiple reasons:
The underlying case was not “actual or imminent litigation.” The Judgment Fund, and the settlement authority statute it works with (28 U.S.C. § 2414), require a genuine dispute between adverse parties. The Florida court itself questioned whether Trump v. IRS presented a real case or controversy — and the parties dismissed it before that question was resolved. A collusive lawsuit, the complaint argues, cannot generate a legitimate settlement. Courts have long held that they lack power to adjudicate “agreed cases gotten up by collusion.”
The fund pays future claimants who were never parties to any lawsuit. The Judgment Fund is for settling actual claims brought against the United States. The Anti-Weaponization Fund proposes to pay anyone who submits a claim — people who have filed nothing, sued no one, and whose cases have not been vetted by DOJ lawyers.
The fund is wholly unrelated to the underlying claims. The Florida lawsuit was about Trump’s tax return leak. The Anti-Weaponization Fund is about compensating January 6 defendants. The settlement agreement itself acknowledges that the Trump plaintiffs received “no economic benefit” from the settlement. That is a remarkable admission: the settlement does not resolve the claims that were allegedly being litigated. Instead, it creates a mechanism to pay third parties who weren’t parties to the case.
DOJ’s own policy prohibits this. The complaint cites an Attorney General memorandum — issued by Pam Bondi on February 5, 2025 — reinstating a prohibition on settlement agreements that award money to third parties who are “neither victims nor parties” to the suit. The Anti-Weaponization Fund does exactly what Bondi’s own memo forbade.
2. The Fund Violates the Constitution
Appropriations Clause: Under the Constitution, “no money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequences of appropriations made by law.” Congress appropriates money; the executive branch spends it on what Congress authorized. The complaint argues that the fund is spending $1.776 billion on a purpose Congress never authorized, without any legislative input or accountability.
Appointments Clause: The Constitution requires that “Officers of the United States” be appointed by the President with Senate confirmation (for principal officers) or by heads of departments (for inferior officers). The complaint argues that the Fund’s five members — who have unreviewable authority to dispense billions of dollars and issue official government apologies — are principal officers. Principal officers need Senate confirmation. They’re being appointed by the Attorney General without any Senate involvement.
The key precedent here is Lucia v. SEC (2018), in which the Supreme Court held that SEC administrative law judges were “Officers of the United States” requiring proper appointment. The test is whether someone exercises “significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States” and occupies a “continuing position established by law.” Fund members who can hand out billions without any review arguably clear that bar easily.
Separation of Powers: The executive branch cannot create a new federal agency — functionally, that is what the Anti-Weaponization Fund is — without Congressional authorization. Congress controls the existence, structure, and funding of executive offices.
First Amendment: The fund only pays claimants who were harmed by Democratic officials’ “weaponization.” It is, by design, viewpoint-discriminatory. The government cannot hand out benefits on the basis of political viewpoint. The complaint cites National Rifle Association v. Vullo (2024), in which the Supreme Court reaffirmed that the First Amendment prohibits the government from penalizing disfavored viewpoints.
Equal Protection: Relatedly, the fund treats people who allege harm from Democratic officials differently from people who allege harm from Republican officials. There is no rational basis for that distinction — the harm is the same regardless of which party’s officials caused it.
Fourteenth Amendment, Section 4: This is the complaint’s most unusual argument, and it deserves special attention. Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, states that “neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.” This provision was designed to prevent former Confederate states from compensating those who had fought against the Union.
The complaint argues that January 6 was an insurrection — multiple courts have said so — and that the Anti-Weaponization Fund is designed to pay the debts of insurrectionists (legal fees, financial losses from prosecution). Trump himself said the fund would reimburse people who “paid legal fees that they didn’t have [to pay]” and whose “lives have been destroyed.” The complaint argues this is precisely what Section 4 prohibits.
3. The Fund Was Arbitrary and Capricious
The Administrative Procedure Act — the main federal law governing how agencies make rules and decisions — requires that agency actions be reasoned, not arbitrary. The complaint catalogs multiple failures of reason:
- No analysis was done of the strength of Trump’s claims in the Florida suit.
- No coherent explanation was offered for why those claims justified creating a fund for unrelated third parties.
- No procedures for paying claims have been established or made public.
- No opportunity for public comment was provided.
- The fund has no safeguards against paying people who committed violence against police officers.
4. Notice and Comment
Federal agencies generally must publish proposed rules in the Federal Register and allow the public to comment before those rules take effect. The creation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund received no such notice-and-comment process. The complaint argues this alone makes it unlawful.
The Standing Problem: The First Hurdle
Before any court can evaluate any of these arguments, the plaintiffs must establish standing — the legal right to bring the case at all. Standing requires that plaintiffs have suffered a real, concrete injury caused by the defendant’s action that can be remedied by a court order.
The government will almost certainly challenge standing aggressively. The core question is whether Gordon and Romano have been personally harmed by the fund itself — as distinct from all the other things Trump and his administration have done (pardons, executive orders, firings) that also characterized their work as improper.
The complaint’s answer is creative and layered:
The fund transforms political rhetoric into official government action. Trump’s Twitter posts and campaign speeches characterizing the prosecutions as “weaponized” were political speech. The settlement agreement and the fund are different: they are binding legal documents, signed by senior government officials, that formally commit the United States government to the position that the Capitol Siege Section prosecutors acted for “improper and unlawful political, personal, and/or ideological reasons.” Every time the fund pays a claim, that characterization is amplified and made more official.
Moreover, Gordon and Romano are publicly identified with their work at the Capitol Siege Section — through news coverage, congressional testimony, their own professional biographies, and the firings themselves. They aren’t anonymous bureaucrats. Their reputations are directly implicated.
They also allege concrete downstream harms: security threats (Romano’s LinkedIn photo was edited to read “Domestic Enemy”), professional consequences (Gordon was fired, Romano was forced out), and chilling effects on future employment.
Whether this is enough to establish standing is genuinely uncertain. Courts have recognized reputational harm as a cognizable injury, but the injury must be sufficiently direct and concrete. The government will argue that a general political characterization — even one embedded in a government document — does not inflict the kind of personal, particular injury that federal courts can remedy. The standing fight will likely be the first major battleground in this case.
Evaluating the Arguments: Strengths and Weaknesses
Plaintiffs’ Strongest Arguments
The collusive lawsuit argument is probably the most legally powerful. If Trump v. IRS was not a real case — if there was never a genuine adverse relationship between the parties, as the Florida court itself suspected — then it cannot generate a valid settlement, and no settlement means no legitimate basis for the Judgment Fund payment. The Florida court’s own order explicitly raising Article III concerns gives this argument judicial credibility before this case even begins.
The Appropriations Clause argument is textually strong. The fund is spending money in ways Congress never authorized, and the Judgment Fund was not designed for this purpose.
The Appointments Clause argument has real teeth under current Supreme Court precedent. If the Fund’s members have final, unreviewable power over billions of dollars, they look a lot like principal officers under Lucia.
The arbitrary-and-capricious arguments are well-documented. The complaint quotes the settlement agreement’s own admission that the Florida plaintiffs received “no economic benefit” — a devastating acknowledgment that the settlement is pretextual.
The Fourteenth Amendment Section 4 argument, while novel, could be powerful if courts are willing to engage it. The text is clear, the historical purpose was to prevent exactly this kind of compensating insurrectionists, and the factual record of judicial findings that January 6 was an insurrection is solid.
Plaintiffs’ Weaknesses
Standing remains genuinely uncertain. Courts have historically been reluctant to grant standing based on diffuse reputational harm from government policy statements. The government will argue that the pardons, executive orders, and political speeches already accomplished whatever reputational harm the fund is causing — making the fund’s marginal contribution insufficient to establish standing.
The APA may not apply as cleanly as the complaint suggests. Settlement agreements occupy an unusual space in administrative law. Courts have not consistently treated settlement negotiations and agreements as “agency rulemaking” subject to APA requirements. The government will argue this was a litigation decision, not a rulemaking.
The political question doctrine is a lurking risk. Courts sometimes decline to adjudicate matters they consider inherently political. A case asking courts to rule that the government cannot officially characterize past prosecutions as politically motivated touches sensitive institutional nerves.
The Fourteenth Amendment Section 4 argument has almost no modern case law. Its novelty cuts both ways — it could be a powerful tool that courts have simply never used, or it could be dismissed as a reach too far. Courts are generally cautious about enforcing constitutional provisions without guiding precedent.
The government’s stay argument will be formidable. The administration will argue that even if some elements of the fund are questionable, courts should not enjoin the entire operation of a presidential settlement agreement.
Defenses the Government Will Raise
Beyond standing, expect the government to argue:
- The President has broad constitutional authority over executive agencies, pardons, and law enforcement policy — and creating a fund to address perceived injustices is within that authority.
- The Florida lawsuit was a genuine dispute (notwithstanding the court’s skepticism), properly settled, properly paying from the Judgment Fund.
- Fund members are inferior officers whose appointment by the AG is permissible.
- Political characterizations of prosecutorial decisions are within the executive’s First Amendment rights to express.
What Happens Next
For the plaintiffs: Almost certainly, they will file a motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) and/or a preliminary injunction, asking the court to freeze the Anti-Weaponization Fund’s operation while the case proceeds. This is the immediate priority — if the fund starts paying out claims, the harm becomes harder to remedy. A TRO hearing could happen within days or weeks.
For the defendants: The government will file a motion to dismiss, arguing primarily that the plaintiffs lack standing and that their claims fail on the merits. That briefing process will take months.
The Florida case looms large. The court in Trump v. IRS has not finished with the matter. There is pending briefing on whether the parties committed a fraud on the court. If that court finds the case was collusive and reopens it, the entire legal foundation of the Anti-Weaponization Fund — built on the settlement of that case — could crumble.
Congressional response is possible. Democrats in Congress may introduce legislation targeting the fund. Republicans control both chambers, making such legislation unlikely to pass, but the effort would generate political pressure and add to the factual record.
Who Will Prevail?
Predicting outcomes in politically charged litigation against the executive branch is hazardous, but the legal arguments here are serious enough to deserve honest assessment.
The plaintiffs face a significant — but not insurmountable — standing hurdle. If they clear it, several of their merits arguments are genuinely strong. A judge examining the Appointments Clause challenge in light of Lucia, the Appropriations Clause challenge in light of the fund’s extraordinary improvisation, and the collusive-lawsuit argument in light of the Florida court’s own skepticism would have substantial legal basis to rule for the plaintiffs.
The fund’s design seems almost engineered to fail legal scrutiny: a sum chosen for its symbolic resonance with an insurrection, a fund that by its own terms pays people unrelated to the underlying lawsuit, administered by officers appointed without Senate confirmation, with no judicial review, no public procedures, and no notice-and-comment. If a Democratic administration had done any one of these things, conservative legal scholars would have lined up to call it a constitutional crisis.
The preliminary injunction motion is where the real early test lies. To obtain a preliminary injunction, plaintiffs must show (1) a likelihood of success on the merits, (2) irreparable harm absent the injunction, (3) that the balance of harms favors them, and (4) that the public interest supports relief. The arguments above suggest the first factor is at least plausible. The ongoing payments to insurrectionists — including potentially violent ones — satisfy the second. The public interest in constitutional governance supports the fourth.
This case has a real chance of producing an injunction that freezes the Anti-Weaponization Fund while the litigation proceeds. Whether it ultimately succeeds on the merits will depend heavily on how the court resolves the standing question and how receptive it is to the novel Fourteenth Amendment Section 4 argument.
Why This Case Matters Beyond the Courtroom
The implications of this lawsuit extend well beyond the fate of two former prosecutors or even the $1.776 billion fund.
The legitimacy of the January 6 prosecutions. If the Anti-Weaponization Fund operates as designed, it will constitute an official, ongoing government declaration that the prosecution of January 6 defendants was political misconduct. Every payment made and every apology issued will be a formal reaffirmation of that position. That matters not only for the reputations of the prosecutors involved, but for the historical and legal record of what happened on January 6 and what the law said about it.
Executive branch control of the spending power. If this fund is upheld, it establishes a blueprint for future administrations: sue yourself in a friendly jurisdiction, settle collusively, and use the Judgment Fund to create a new spending program without any Congressional authorization. The implications for the separation of powers are profound.
The Appointments Clause. If the Fund’s members can operate without Senate confirmation, it weakens one of the few mechanisms by which Congress retains oversight over executive officers.
The Fourteenth Amendment’s insurrection clause. A judicial ruling on Section 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment in the context of January 6 would be historically significant — the first time a federal court has applied that Reconstruction-era provision to modern events characterized as an insurrection.
The independence of federal prosecutors. The firing of Capitol Siege Section prosecutors, combined with the official government declaration that their work was politically motivated, sends a chilling message to every federal prosecutor in the country: if you prosecute political allies of a future administration, you may be fired, your reputation may be destroyed, and the government may officially certify your misconduct. If courts permit this, the independence of the federal prosecutorial corps — a cornerstone of the rule of law — is materially weakened.
This case is, at bottom, a lawsuit about whether there are legal limits on a president’s ability to use the machinery of government to rewrite history, compensate political allies, and punish those who served the law faithfully. The courts will now have to decide.
Case filed June 1, 2026 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Civil Action No. 1:26-cv-01907.