Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche may have entered an agreement this week to kill the “anti-weaponization” fund, but legal challenges to it are still playing out. Today, plaintiffs in one case have alleged the deal to grant President Donald Trump and his family IRS immunity is illegal.

The group that brought the most successful legal challenge is re-upping its fight against the nearly $1.8 billion taxpayer fund, despite Blanche’s written assurances that the fund is dead and the immunity deal is narrowed.

The plaintiffs — led by a broad coalition, including a former Jan. 6 prosecutor — filed an amended complaint Thursday, arguing the fund, which would have compensated convicted Jan. 6 rioters, is not really dead and the legal issues surrounding it are very much alive. 

“The Anti-Weaponization Fund and the Immunity Order are just as unlawful and harmful today as they were the day the orders were issued,” they write. 

While multiple cases have targeted the fund, this is the first legal challenge to the immunity agreement itself. They say the immunity provision gives Trump “a lucrative and unconstitutional emolument” and violates a federal statute that prohibits the president from asking the IRS to end audits of particular taxpayers, including himself. 

There had been questions circling about whether anyone had standing to challenge it, but the suit also added a new plaintiff — the National Treasury Employees Union — in an attempt to address that issue. That group represents career IRS auditors, who will be responsible for terminating any existing audits of Trump, his two eldest sons and the Trump Organization. 

“The Immunity Order will conscript career IRS employees into providing the President and his relatives and affiliates with a lucrative benefit not available to any other Americans,” the complaint alleges. Fulfilling that request, they argue, would cause these auditors to violate their oath of office and subject them to criminal liability; refusing that request would put them at risk of retaliation.   

Blanche did not rescind the immunity deal, but he indicated that he was narrowing the terms of it in a document posted online Sunday night. He wrote that the immunity provision covered the “named parties” to Trump’s IRS lawsuit. That is much narrower than the covered parties outlined in the original May 19 addendum that established the immunity agreement. The original order includes the named parties — Trump, his two eldest sons and the Trump Organization — as well as “related or affiliated individuals.”

The document Blanche posted Sunday, however, is unsigned and therefore not a legally binding order. The Department of Justice has not published any new, signed order that officially narrows the scope of the deal.

The amended complaint latches onto that fact. “This unsigned piece of paper, which carries no more weight than a press release, confirms that the IRS will terminate tax audits and liabilities at the request of the president,” the complaint reads. 

The plaintiffs point to loopholes in Blanche’s order that purportedly killed the fund, arguing it is still alive and still illegal. “This present-tense wordsmithing assuredly does not affirm, under penalty of perjury, that the Anti-Weaponization Fund will not proceed in any manner, or under any name,’ either now or in the future,” they write. 

“Nor does it purport to prevent the parties to the agreement in Trump, including President Trump, from enforcing that agreement.”

In June, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema had asked the DOJ to submit a sworn declaration in which they assured her the fund would “not proceed in any manner, or under any name.” The DOJ did not comply with that request then, and it stopped short of affirming that now. 

In his signed order Sunday night, Blanche did not include language stating that no such fund would be created in the future and no part of his termination order indicates that the DOJ could not revive this or a comparable fund in some fashion in the future. Blanche merely rescinded the order and said it “shall have no force or effect.”

That move has apparently not assuaged the concerns of the individuals who brought this legal challenge. 

The DOJ did not immediately respond to MS NOW’s request for comment on the amended complaint. 

This filing comes just one week before Brinkema is set to hear arguments on the Justice Department’s bid to dismiss the legal challenge against the fund, though this new complaint may delay that hearing. 

Brinkema indefinitely blocked the Trump administration from taking steps to create the fund in June, while the legal challenge has continued.  

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