They Blinked

Trump's retreat on the slush fund is a humiliation—but Judge Williams may just be getting started.

Jun 01, 2026

As of this afternoon, President Trump is retreating from the $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund, according to The New York Times and multiple other reports. The White House communicated the decision to Republican leaders on Capitol Hill today. The decisive moment came earlier Monday, when Speaker Mike Johnson met with Trump and told him bluntly that the fund was torpedoing the $70 billion immigration enforcement bill—the centerpiece of the administration’s legislative agenda.

That conversation, a source says, is what finally convinced the president to drop it. Senate Majority Leader Thune had already told reporters that changes were a “safe bet” and that “the best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves.” House Republicans had been actively looking for ways to kill the fund, and the Senate was already in open revolt—with more than a dozen Republican senators, including Lindsey Graham, privately urging Trump to pull the plug.

Trump and the DOJ waged a similar, strategic retreat a few weeks ago, when his lawyers filed a panicked voluntary dismissal two days before they would have had to walk into Judge Williams’s courtroom and explain, under the solemnity of federal proceedings, how Donald Trump suing an agency he controls, defended by his own former personal criminal defense lawyer, constituted a genuine adversarial lawsuit. Pinned between a rock and a hard place, he bolted.

So Trump blinked. Again. And on an ill-advised move—bogus and illegal on multiple fronts—on which he nevertheless had fully staked his diminishing political capital.

DOJ issued a statement today that it would “abide by the Court’s ruling”—meaning Judge Leonie Brinkema’s temporary restraining order out of Virginia, which froze the fund Friday, not Judge Kathleen Williams’s order reopening the settlement, about which more below.

The DOJ statement defended the fund, said nothing about it being permanently dead, and left conspicuously open the question of whether it could be revived.

So the parameters of the retreat remain unclear as of this writing. It may be a full capitulation. It may be a tactical pause dressed up as a concession. Either way, as a matter of political reality, it is a humiliation—the administration’s biggest self-inflicted wound of Trump 2.0, now compounded by a very public retreat.

In my dispatches on this scandal going back to February, and in my conversations with Representative Jamie Raskin and others, I argued that while the legal avenues for challenging the fund were real but difficult—standing problems, appropriations law hurdles, the fund’s architecture designed specifically to be unreachable—the political blowback would ultimately be too powerful to ignore.

That was because the emotional and political core of the entire scheme was the proposition that the January 6 rioters were victims—“patriots” at a “love-in,” not insurrectionists at a riot designed to hijack the Constitution—entitled to taxpayer-funded compensation. That core was part and parcel of Trump’s relentless and corrupt effort to whitewash history and his own role in trying to steal the 2020 election.

And the political winds, in fact, proved too strong to ignore. The moment Republican Senators and House members had to confront the question—do you support giving money to the people who beat police officers on January 6?—the fund became politically radioactive. Ted Cruz called a meeting with Blanche and Senate Republicans last week one of the roughest he had seen in his Senate career. Another attendee called it the toughest grilling of any administration official they had ever witnessed. Lindsey Graham, of all people, privately urged Trump to drop it. Thune told reporters that “the best way to handle it is if the administration decides to shut it down themselves.” And Johnson, in his Monday meeting with Trump, delivered the message that finally landed: the fund was killing the immigration bill, and House Republicans were looking for ways to stop it with or without the White House.

Senate Democrats twisted the knife further today, with Schumer releasing a “Dear Colleague” letter vowing a coordinated multi-front assault—floor votes, oversight, appropriations fights—and Senators Schiff, Kelly, and Slotkin introducing the Drain the Slush Fund Act to bar any payouts to those convicted of crimes or connected to January 6. They might not have been positioned to stop the arrangement legally, but they were able, with the foreseeable aid of Republican defectors, to keep the spotlight turned up high enough to make it impossible to look away, as the White House plainly was hoping.

Trump will now take serious lumps from the MAGA base—far more than if he had never embarked on this asinine detour in the first place. The pardoned rioters who were salivating over their anticipated windfalls are going to be furious. Brandon Fellows, who spent three years in prison for his January 6 conduct, had already sought $30 million from DOJ before the fund was even announced and told CNN he was “feeling confident.” The Proud Boys leader expected a $2 to $5 million personal payout. Robert Gieswein—who marched with the Proud Boys, sprayed aerosol irritant at Capitol Police officers, threw a punch at another officer, and served four years in prison—told The Free Press he wants up to $10 million, though he’d be willing to settle for less.

It looks as if all of them, and the roughly 1,600 other January 6 defendants, are going to be left empty-handed and enraged. More, Trump is backing down precisely because the politics of supporting them became untenable—it is they whom Trump is plainly abandoning. All of that amounts to a richly deserved comeuppance for Trump’s staggering audacity in trying to make the American people not just pardon but financially reward the most serious assault on American democracy since the Civil War.

But if Trump, Blanche, and the attorneys involved in the original scheme—including Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward and Trump private attorney Boris Epshteyn—think that retreat puts an end to the prior misconduct, they may be in for a rude surprise.

Whereas Brinkema’s order froze the fund’s operation going forward, Williams is asking a fundamentally different question: what already happened in her court? She is not interested in where the fund goes from here. She is interested in whether she was deceived, whether her court served as an instrument of fraud, and whether the lawyers who were involved in the bogus settlement violated their most basic obligations to the tribunal.

Last week, a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges filed a motion urging Williams to reopen the case under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(4). Their filing was blunt: “The Court was deceived.” They argued that Trump and his co-plaintiffs deliberately withheld any mention of the settlement from their dismissal notice—timing the withdrawal to outrun Williams’s scrutiny—and that the resulting arrangement “is a product of collusion and is itself a fraud on the Court.”

Williams did not hesitate to act on the suggestion. On Friday, she issued an order reopening the case, invoking Rule 11—which requires attorneys to certify that any filing serves a legitimate purpose—and citing extensive case law for the proposition that a court may raise Rule 11 violations on its own initiative and that a party cannot avoid sanctions simply by voluntarily dismissing the case.

Williams’s order quotes directly the rule’s application to “filing a lawsuit for some improper purpose” and zeroes in on whether the entire lawsuit was phony baloney from the start—filed solely to manufacture a pretext for the bogus settlement. Williams also noted in a pointed footnote that the tax amnesty addendum may conflict with DOJ’s own internal policies, and that it was signed by Blanche alone, with no one from the IRS. She gave Trump and his lawyers until June 12 to respond to three specific questions: whether the parties colluded and are truly adverse; whether the dismissal was premised on deception; and whether the court was “the victim of a fraud.”

The lawyers in Williams’s crosshairs are not minor figures. Stanley Woodward, the No. 3 official at DOJ, signed the settlement agreement. Before joining the administration, Woodward represented Trump’s co-defendant Walt Nauta in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, along with multiple January 6 defendants—men who, like Nauta, were later pardoned by the president he now serves. His signature appears on a document a federal judge has been asked to declare a fraud on the court.

Then there is Boris Epshteyn, Trump’s outside legal consigliere, whom The New York Times reports played a central coordinating role in brokering the entire arrangement—circulating drafts of the tax amnesty addendum, shuttling between Trump, his personal lawyers, and DOJ officials, and, according to The Wall Street Journal, suggesting names for the five-member commission that would control the fund’s payouts.

Epshteyn is a man whose legal career has never been far from an ethical train wreck: indicted in Arizona for his role in the fake elector scheme; the subject of an ethics complaint with the New York bar; accused by former Missouri Governor Eric Greitens in a sworn declaration of soliciting payments from transition job-seekers in exchange for administration appointments. His personal conduct has been no less checkered—a misdemeanor assault plea after sucker-punching a smaller man at an Arizona bar in 2014, and a 2021 arrest on allegations of groping two women at a Scottsdale nightclub. This is the man at the center of a nearly two-billion-dollar rearrangement of public money.

Williams can do more than sanction individual lawyers. She can make a formal finding of fraud on the court—a declaration that the entire proceeding was a constitutional nullity engineered to deceive the judiciary. That finding, even if it cannot directly unwind the fund, would arm every political opponent, every congressional challenger, and every future litigant with a federal judge’s formal conclusion that Trump and the administration committed a fraud on the court of the United States. That finding would travel with the account of the fund, all the way, possibly, to impeachment proceedings in the next Congress.

I expect the administration to try the same move with Williams that it just tried with the fund itself: a strategic retreat dressed up as compliance. He and Epstheyn may try to elude her order altogether, or failing that, to submit on June 12 a filing that treats the whole reckoning as moot: the case is closed, the voluntary dismissal is self-executing under Eleventh Circuit precedent, there is nothing left for her to adjudicate. It is the legal equivalent of a stiff arm: not quite refusing to respond, but responding with nothing of substance.

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