In another stunning loss in federal court Monday, a judge slapped down convicted felon and sexual predator Donald Trump and the Justice Department he controls with a blistering decision on a illegal deal with the IRS that tried to give the disgraced president a 1.8 billion dollar slush fund and outright immunity against any future judgements for tax fraud.
“In sum,” wrote U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams in her blistering decisiion, “the facts before this Court demonstrate that there was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail.”
She continues: “This action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute. The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing 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.”
In the Washington Post, Jeremy Roebuck and Mark Berman report:
A federal judge on Monday denounced President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS as an improper attempt to “manipulate” the court process and legitimize a controversial deal that afforded him significant tax protections and sought to establish a nearly $1.8 billion fund for alleged victims of politicized prosecutions.
In a blistering ruling, U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams suggested that Trump’s attorneys and top Justice Department officials who signed off on that agreement could face professional sanctions. She barred them from citing any provision of their private resolution in future official proceedings.
Williams noted Monday that in that case, the parties involved spent a decade in litigation and reached a deal eventually approved by a court.
The agreement initially included a provision creating anearly$1.8 billion taxpayer-funded pot of money for those who, like Trump, have claimed they were victims of a “weaponized” justice system. The Justice Department later said it is no longer moving forward with that plan, after facing bipartisan backlash and accusations of self-dealing.
Acting attorney general Todd Blanche, however, has stood by a separate aspect of the deal that purports to shield Trump, his sons and their affiliated business entities from any past tax claims — a potentially lucrative benefit for a president who has often complained about burdensome IRS audits.
While Williams’s ruling Monday did not directly strike down the deal, it was unclear whether the restrictions she imposed on citing it in official proceedings could practically limit the tax protectionsit laid out for Trump and his family.
“This action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute,” she wrote. “The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing 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.”
Since telling lawmakers that the Justice Department was abandoning the payout fund, Blanche has refused to put that pledge in writing — even resisting a call for him to do so from a federal judge examining the fund’s legality in a separate case in Virginia.
The Justice Department, Williams wrote, “has remained conspicuously absent and silent when serious questions about this matter have been raised.” She said she could only presume that silence was because officials know the department’s “position would not withstand judicial scrutiny.”
Williams ordered the court’s clerk to send copies of her ruling to the attorney disciplinary bodies in New York and D.C., which have launched inquiries into Blanche and Stanley Woodward, the Justice Department’s No. 3 official, in response to unrelated complaints about their conduct at the agency. Woodward signed off on many of the documents purporting to memorialize the agreement between the Trumps and the IRS.
Judge Williams said the moves by Trump, his sons, Blanche and other Justice Department attorneys acting on his behalf, ignored the law and sought extensive use of taxpayer funds. She ruled that such stunts were illegal and require sanctions against the acting attorney general and others involved in the illegal stunt.
She also suggested Trump should face additional costs to pay the attorneys who filed actions against him and he and his sons no longer have immunity from prosecutions for tax fraud and other crimes.
Blanche faces a tough confirmation hearing to become the permanant attorney general under Trump’s control, a stunt that is bringing new questions from Republican Senators who are fed up with Trump’s actions as a wannabe fascist dictator who believes laws don’t affect him and his criminal activity.
As Andrew Duehren and Alan Feuer report in The New York Times:
The ruling was the latest example of a federal judge calling out the Trump administration for twisting normal court procedures to the president’s advantage. Mr. Trump has repeatedly used the criminal justice system to pursue and punish those he believes to be his enemies. But in this case, Judge Williams wrote, he sought to use the civil legal system to benefit himself even though the law did not allow it.
“Whatever may be the parties’ wishes, inclinations or the dictates of their passion,” she wrote, “they cannot alter the state of the facts or evade the rule of law.”
In January, Mr. Trump sued the I.R.S., blaming it for the leak of his tax returns during his first term and demanding at least $10 billion in damages. But rather than taking the typical steps to defend the agency against Mr. Trump’s claims, the Justice Department instead reached what it called a settlement agreement that included two remarkable provisions.
The first created a $1.8 billion fund aimed at compensating allies of Mr. Trump who say they were the victims of so-called government weaponization. The prospect of Mr. Trump’s administration making extensive payouts to the people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, immediately set off a political firestorm, and Mr. Blanche later said the Justice Department would not move forward with the fund.
But Mr. Blanche, Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, had also signed a separate order granting the president, his family and their businesses wide-ranging and unprecedented immunity from tax inquiries. He directed the I.R.S. to stop any ongoing audits of the Trumps and also told the agency to not conduct any new investigations of tax returns they had already filed.
That protection from audits — potentially very valuable for Mr. Trump, who has aggressively avoided taxes throughout his life — did not attract the same political pushback from the Republicans. Mr. Blanche has said it will remain in place.
Under Judge Williams’s order, Mr. Trump and his family are prohibited from calling the audit protections a “settlement” in any official proceeding, but it is unclear if that will otherwise prevent Mr. Trump and the many companies affiliated with him and his family from relying on it to try to escape I.R.S. scrutiny. An adverse ruling in just one I.R.S. examination of Mr. Trump could have cost him more than $100 million, The New York Times has reported.
Experts have doubted whether Mr. Blanche even had the authority to direct the I.R.S. to stop audits, and Judge Williams said that his directive violated a federal law preventing the White House from controlling I.R.S. investigations. It is also unclear if the I.R.S. has carried out Mr. Blanche’s order, now almost two months old.
In her ruling, Judge Williams took direct aim at Mr. Blanche at a sensitive moment — days before he was to appear in the Senate for his confirmation hearing as attorney general. She wrote that she was “extremely troubled” by testimony he gave to the Senate in May when he asserted that the settlement agreement had never been submitted to a court because the case had been dismissed and there was “no mechanism” for reviewing the agreement.
“This answer is, at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous,” the judge wrote. “The court was available to review any pleading by any party at any time during this lawsuit.”
Republican members of both the House and Senate admit, privately, that they are “concerned” over Trump’s increasing criminal actions as a disgraced president but few are willing to come forward to publicly challenge a spiteful president turns on anyone who criticizes his illegal and unconstitutional actions.
From the outset, Judge Williams, an Obama appointee, had profound questions about Mr. Trump’s suit against the I.R.S. Because the president was seeking damages from a part of the federal government that he controlled, the judge was concerned that he was effectively suing himself and was on both sides of the case.
She spent much of her order fleshing out why that was indeed true, ultimately concluding that this suit lacked what all valid lawsuits must have: an actual controversy between two opposing parties. Judge Williams pointed to the fact that the Justice Department never raised several possible defenses to Mr. Trump’s claims, including that he filed the suit after the statute of limitations for doing so. She also highlighted that Mr. Trump has sought total control over the executive branch.
“Whether executive branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax moneys for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this court,” the judge wrote. “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 lead plaintiff and the government are one, a fully realized unitary interest.”
In a statement, a representative of the Justice Department called Judge Williams “partisan” and said the government and Mr. Trump were, in fact, at odds with each other.
“There was a live dispute because the plaintiffs sought relief that the government had not provided,” the spokesperson said.
Beyond making referrals for Alejandro Brito, Mr. Trump’s primary lawyer in the case, and Mr. Blanche, Judge Williams also said she would send her order to the District of Columbia bar for its investigation of Stanley Woodward Jr., a top Justice Department official who signed the paperwork creating the $1.8 billion fund. Another lawyer for Mr. Trump, Daniel Epstein, will be banned from making court appearances in the Southern District of Florida for one year.
Judge Williams also opened up the possibility of Mr. Trump having to pay monetary penalties in the case. Several third parties have filed “friend-of-the-court” briefs in the case, and she said those lawyers could request reimbursement from Mr. Trump for their costs.
The claim by a Justice Department “representative” was, like so much that comes out of that department since Trump appointed Blanche, was an outright lie. So is the criminal presidency of Donald Trump.
Lawrence O’Donnell of MS Now comments on the decision of Judge Williams:
