The Roberts Court’s long-standing project of insulating executive discretionary spending from judicial review has reached its logical conclusion: the federal government is now paying the rioters who assaulted the Capitol. By allowing the executive to transform a private tax-leak settlement into an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” for paramilitary actors, the administration has created an engine of civil-war finance, and the judiciary has provided the silence—via an expanded political-question doctrine and sovereign-immunity barriers to appropriation challenges—required for it to spin. The officers who defended the building, Daniel Hodges and Harry Dunn, are now attempting to litigate the integrity of the state in a federal court system that has systematically dismantled the tools of accountability.
The fund is a doctrinal artifact. It traces to the settlement of Donald Trump’s suit against the IRS—a litigation-strategy maneuver that turned a tax-return grievance into a $1.776 billion pool of executive-controlled cash. In re IRS Tax Record Privacy Litigation, Settlement Agreement ¶ 12 (D.D.C. 2026) (designating the amount for an “Anti-Weaponization Fund”). Attorney General Todd Blanche serves as the fund’s ultimate gatekeeper, appointing the five-member commission that will distribute payments to people claiming to be victims of “politically motivated prosecutions”—a standard the commission itself will adjudicate. Blanche, whose career before the Justice Department was defined by his role as Trump’s personal attorney, has declined to rule out payouts to the attackers, dismissing the public backlash as “fake outrage.” His office’s stated position rests on a clean procedural frame: a negotiated civil settlement provides a non-criminal pathway to unwind past judgments, and the commission retains discretion to screen out applicants. The operational reality is that a private citizen’s lawsuit against the IRS has been re-routed through the Attorney General’s office into a discretionary payout pot that bypasses Congress entirely. The same legal circle that negotiated the settlement terms now controls the distribution. This is not a court-ordered remediation; it is an executive-endorsed slush fund.
The officers’ lawsuit, filed by former Jan. 6 prosecutor Brendan Ballou, challenges the fund as an “illegal slush fund” that “encourages those who enacted violence in the President’s name to continue to do so.” (complaint at 4) More than 100 officers were injured on January 6; over 1,600 criminal charges have been filed; the rioters assaulted officers in the tunnels and ripped off masks to identify them. Ballou, who handled those very cases, notes that the fund increases the danger to officers who already face “credible threats of death and violence.” The pattern of opposition has widened to include other litigants challenging the mechanism on statutory grounds.
The doctrinal architecture that makes this possible is a familiar stack of judicial deference. For years, the Roberts Court has narrowed Bivens remedies, expanded the political-question doctrine to insulate executive discretionary spending from judicial review, and tightened standing requirements to the point where the executive branch can now create a private-money-laundering scheme using funds from the settlement of a lawsuit brought by the President himself, without an obvious path for judicial dissolution. The sovereign-immunity bar on appropriation challenges closes off what was historically the cleanest route—a taxpayer or competitor suit asking the courts to declare the spending unconstitutional—leaving only plaintiffs who can show particularized injury, a threshold the rioters’ officers can meet only because they have documented threats of death and violence. When the judiciary systematically contracts the “case or controversy” requirements for holding the state accountable, the result is exactly this: a state-sponsored payout for the paramilitary groups that commit violence in the President’s name.
This fund is the realization of the executive’s ultimate capacity: the power to reward the enforcement of its will and punish its enemies without any check. The judiciary has watched this stack develop from Hernandez v. Mesa to the ongoing shadow-docket expansions; the Court is the conspirator’s lawyer, providing the doctrinal quiet while the executive empties the Treasury to pay the rioters. The state is no longer protecting the officers who defended it. It is funding their assailants.