The plan to create a fund that could have funneled taxpayer money to the president’s allies drew repeated scrutiny, including a rare rebuke from Senate Republicans.
Page B1From§Eachthe wee small hours edition — 5 September 2026
Judge orders DOJ to name whoever created $1.8 billion fund no one will admit to building.
As it ran on the front
Somewhere in the Department of Justice there is a filing for $1.8 billion, and somewhere in that filing there is a blank line. All together now — the caption. U.S. Magistrate Judge Ivan D. Davis, ruling Friday in a lawsuit first brought by a fired Jan. 6 prosecutor and a law professor, ordered the DOJ to disclose the names of whoever set up the "anti-weaponization" fund, a program built to compensate people who say the federal government investigated them improperly. The order does not ask what the fund does. It asks who built it. Those are supposed to be the easy parts of a filing.
The fund is, as of Friday, dead — the Washington Examiner's word is "defunct." That is the second beat: the government spent enough process on this thing to kill it before a judge could get an author's name attached to it. A plan large enough to move $1.8 billion in taxpayer money apparently arrived without anyone's name on the paperwork, the way a package arrives at a house where everyone swears they didn't order anything.…
…(cont) Before it died, the plan drew what the New York Times calls a rare rebuke from Senate Republicans — rare because rebuking your own president's Justice Department is not the normal order of business, and notable here because the objection came from the fund's own side of the aisle. Follow that clause and the story turns again: a fund built, reportedly, to funnel money toward the president's allies got flagged by the president's allies. That is not a whistleblower. That is the family accountant.
So the record now holds: a dollar figure, a purpose, a lawsuit, a judge, and a rebuke — everything a filing is supposed to carry except the one line every filing is required to carry, the name of who filed it. The order gives the DOJ the chance to fill that in. Whether the line comes back filled in, or comes back the way these things tend to come back, is the next filing, and we will read that one too, clause by clause, the way we read this one.
“They set up a $1.8 billion pot and now can't remember who signed off on it, which is exactly what happens right before a receipt goes missing at a poker night that big. Every dollar of that fund was headed toward whoever running the government decided already got wronged enough, and so far the only one saying so out loud is a fired prosecutor. When even the fund's own party has to distance itself from it, that's not oversight, that's everybody's fingerprints and nobody's signature.”
“Look, paperwork gets lost, that's not a scandal, that's bureaucracy — every agency has filing gaps, this is no different. The fund was designed to compensate legitimate victims of investigatory overreach, full stop, and if a name is missing from a form that's an administrative oversight, not... okay, an administrative oversight on a $1.8 billion fund, I hear how that sounds, but it's still not evidence of anything. Did I just defend not knowing who wrote a $1.8 billion check? That doesn't sound like me.”
The receipts
A federal judge on Friday ordered the Department of Justice to reveal the masterminds behind the now-dead $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund intended to compensate people who claim the federal government improperly targeted them in investigations. U.S.
The ruling comes in a lawsuit first filed by a fired Jan. 6 prosecutor and a law professor seeking to block the “anti-weaponization” fund.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.