A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida sharply criticized President Donald Trump and his attorneys in a ruling on his suit seeking damages from the IRS, saying that it was filed for “an improper purpose—to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.”
The suit was settled with an agreement for a $1.776 billion fund to compensate allies of the president and for immunity from tax audits for the president and his family. The fund has since been abandoned.
Judge Kathleen Williams said that adverseness is required for federal courts to have jurisdiction under Article III of the Constitution, which establishes the judiciary. She noted that Trump is in charge of the executive branch, which includes the IRS, and that “closer examination reveals that a justiciable case or controversy is absent; Plaintiffs and Defendants are not adverse because one party controls this litigation… In reaching this conclusion, the Court determines that Plaintiffs improperly employed this lawsuit to justify a particular award in this matter.”
Williams determined that the suit lacked adverseness, in part, through “Acting Attorney General Blanche’s apparent capacity to speak for both Plaintiffs and Defendants, sign a ‘settlement’ document on behalf of all Parties to this action, and then repudiate part of that agreement, [which] demonstrates that there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case.” She also said that the Court was “extremely troubled” by some of Blanche’s testimony, which she called “temporally accurate [but] at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.”
Judge Williams added:
Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court. The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding. The answer is a resounding “no”… The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel…make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law.
Williams went on to refer Trump attorney Alejandro Brito, who filed the suit, for possible disciplinary action by the Florida state bar. Another Trump attorney, Daniel Epstein, is now banned from filing in the Southern District of Florida for a year.