A fired Jan. 6 prosecutor and a law professor acquitted in a federal criminal case brought by the Trump administration are among the plaintiffs who sued Friday to block a $1.8 billion dollar fund established to give payouts to allies of President Donald Trump.
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, alleges that the “anti-weaponization” fund creates a politically discriminatory process that excludes individuals like the plaintiffs, who say they were mistreated by Republican officials and administrations.
“By its own terms, the Anti-Weaponization Fund is available only to claimants who assert that they were targeted by ‘Democrat’ administrations, even though the current administration has weaponized the awesome power of the federal government against its perceived political opponents like no other administration before it,” the suit states.
Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Floyd, a career federal prosecutor who had been a deputy in the Capitol Siege Section and was fired by former Attorney General Pam Bondi in June 2025, is one of the plaintiffs.
“First, hundreds of people attacked the foundation of an ordered society by trying to stop the results of a free and fair election—committing serious assaults on law enforcement and other crimes as they did so,” Floyd said in a statement, referring to the failed effort by Trump supporters to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s win on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Then, this administration pardoned them — removing the accountability that had been hard earned by victims, witnesses, law enforcement, and prosecutors and imposed by impartial jurors and judges. Now they are asking taxpayers to illegally reward them for their crimes,” he said.
Another plaintiff is Cal State Channel Islands professor Jonathan Caravello, who was acquitted of an assault on law enforcement charge over an incident last summer in which he picked up a tear gas canister that had been deployed by federal agents during a protest against an immigration raid at a California cannabis farm.
The city of New Haven, the National Abortion Federation and the watchdog group Common Cause also joined the suit. All the plaintiffs are represented by Democracy Forward, a progressive nonprofit legal group that filed more than 150 lawsuits in the first year of Trump’s second term.
Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, told NBC News that the fund has a number of constitutional and legal problems.
“There’s literally no legal authority for the fund,” Perryman said. “You don’t get to snap your fingers and it just appears. Congress hasn’t authorized the fund. There’s actually no legal authority to do this.”
Trump, his sons and the Trump Organization had sued the president’s own administration for $10 billion over the leak of his IRS filings, but his private attorneys dropped the lawsuit before a judge could weigh in on whether a court had the authority to hear the case, given Trump’s control over the Justice Department.
The fund was established as part of a settlement agreement that was not overseen by the court.
Two officers who protected the Capitol on Jan. 6 — former Capitol Police Officer Harry Dunn and Metropolitan Police Department Officer Daniel Hodges — filed a separate suit over what they described as a “slush fund” for “insurrectionists.” They argued the fund would “directly finance the violent operations of rioters, paramilitaries, and their supporters.”
And later on Friday, the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington filed another federal lawsuit which described the fund as “a jaw-dropping act of presidential corruption.”
The lawsuit argued the fund wasn’t approved by Congress, unlike prior funds that seek to compensate victims. Nor was it a legal settlement.
“It was created solely by Executive fiat, an unconstitutional taxpayer-funded giveaway to the President’s allies,” the lawsuit says.
