The Justice Department told federal judges on Friday that it would not move forward with establishing a $1.8 billion fund for people claiming to have been unfairly prosecuted by the government, putting the commitment in writing after Todd Blanche, the acting attorney general, had declined to do so days earlier.
The assertion, made in two separate cases challenging the fund, was the department’s clearest statement to date that it was pulling back from a plan to use taxpayer money to make payments to people who said they had suffered “weaponization” at the hands of federal prosecutors.
On Tuesday, Mr. Blanche promised a House subcommittee that the Trump administration had given up on the idea of creating the fund, which had elicited accusations from Democrats of self-dealing and corruption, and was initially met by some Republicans with a measure of incredulity.
But Mr. Blanche equivocated during his appearance on Capitol Hill, saying there was no reason to put his vow in writing. And Mr. Trump himself appeared to walk back Mr. Blanche’s vow, saying on Wednesday that he still loved the idea of the fund and that he believed it was important.
There were more doubts about Republican opposition to the fund when the Senate, after an all-night session on Thursday into Friday morning, rejected efforts to kill it, as lawmakers voted on a bill to finance Mr. Trump’s wide-ranging immigration crackdown.
All of that left the twin filings — one in Federal District Court in Washington and the other in Federal District Court in Alexandria, Va. — as the strongest signals yet that the Justice Department was indeed serious about dropping the idea of the fund, which would involve a panel of five commissioners deciding how to dole out the money.
Both of the filings started with the same succinct sentence: “This dispute concerns an anti-weaponization fund that had not been set up and is now not going forward.”
The filings came in response to two lawsuits challenging the legal basis for the fund.
One was filed in Virginia by a former federal prosecutor who was fired by the Justice Department after helping lead the sprawling prosecution of hundreds of rioters who took part in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The former prosecutor, Andrew Floyd, and two other plaintiffs who claimed to have suffered harms from the Trump administration argued that the fund had been unfairly set up to benefit only purported victims of Democratic administrations.
The other suit was brought by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a watchdog group that described the fund as “a jaw-dropping act of presidential corruption” that was “wholly untethered” to legal action from which it had emerged: a $10 billion lawsuit that Mr. Trump filed against the Internal Revenue Service, accusing the agency of not doing enough to stop one of its contractors from leaking his tax information to reporters in 2019.
A second part of the agreement settling the suit — one granting Mr. Trump, his family and his businesses broad protections from I.R.S. investigations — remains in place.
Even though the Justice Department echoed Mr. Blanche’s vow that the fund would not be put in place, department lawyers said that the courts should not stand in judgment over the fund, adding that the two judges handling the cases had no authority to block it.
One of those judges, Leonie M. Brinkema, had temporarily put the operations of the fund on hold last week so that she could consider the legal issues surrounding it more fully. She scheduled a hearing for June 12 in Alexandria, Va., to delve into those issues.
The other judge, Richard J. Leon, has not yet issued a ruling on the fund, but has set a hearing for Wednesday in Washington for arguments on the question.
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