Harry Litman
‪@harrylitman.bsky.social‬

"If Trump, Blanche, and the attorneys involved in the original scheme think that retreat puts an end to the prior misconduct, they may be in for a rude surprise."

They Blinked
Trump's retreat on the slush fund is a humiliation—but Judge Williams may just be getting started.
harrylitman.substack.com
6:02 PM · Jun 1, 2026

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

Harry Litman
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.

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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.

{snip}

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.”

{snip}