Harry Litman - DOJ to Federal Judges: Pound Sand
The Trump administration’s patent strategy for handling the political fallout from the $1.776 billion slush fund is to insist that Todd Blanche’s hedged assurances to a House Committee that the Department of Justice is not moving forward with the fund quiets the controversy.
But even as the Department insists that the issue is dead, courts continue to address legal challenges. It’s the courts that likely will have the final word on the fund’s status, and their determinations could in turn reanimate political blowback in the Congress. In contrast with the Hill, the DOJ cannot simply bluster its way to its desired resolution in the courts.
Two important filings late last week illustrate the complicated dynamic. The filings come in two different cases, one in the Eastern District of Virginia before Judge Leonie Brinkema, the other in the Southern District of Florida before Judge Kathleen Williams.
I. Virginia Case Before Judge Brinkema
To begin in Virginia, Judge Brinkema handed the Department of Justice a clean way to close out the Floyd case challenging Trump’s $1.776 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund. Without ordering DOJ to do anything, she offered the Department an off-ramp: if Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr., and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent file a declaration, under penalty of perjury, stating that they will not take any action to create or operate the fund and that it “will not proceed in any manner, or under any name,” it would, in her words, “avoid any further litigation in this civil action.”
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/doj-to-federal-judges-pound-sand