Judge’s 'scathing rebuke' of Trump, DOJ in lawsuit against IRS
President Trump and his family acted in bad faith in bringing a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, Judge Kathleen Williams ruled on Monday, “in a scathing rebuke of the president, his attorneys and the Justice Department,” reports The Wall Street Journal.
Trump’s suit against the IRS over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose,” she said as she referred one of his lawyers for potential disciplinary action and characterized the $10 billion complaint as an exercise in self-dealing, reports The Associated Press.
Williams accused Trump and his lawyers of having manipulated the court system when he sued a federal agency under his control, bypassing a requirement that parties in a lawsuit must have adverse interests. The suit ended in a settlement that granted the president immunity from tax audits and established a $1.776 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who believe they’ve been persecuted.
The judge stopped short of explicitly voiding the deal shielding Trump from tax scrutiny but said the government can’t claim in official proceedings that the agreement was the result of a legitimate legal process.
“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,” said Williams, an appointee of President Obama. “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.’”
Though the practical impacts of the ruling may be limited since the lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed months ago and the administration already has abandoned the $1.776 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” that came out of it, “the order nonetheless amounts to a scathing rebuke and tees up a politically uncomfortable line of questioning for Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche as he faces the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing on Wednesday,” AP says.
Williams accused Blanche of giving, “at best, misleading, and, at worst, disingenuous” testimony before Congress.
In defending the deal in prior statements to Congress, Blanche portrayed the fund as comparable to previous settlements reached by the federal government, citing in particular a $760 million fund created through an Obama administration-era settlement to resolve claims of discrimination by Native American farmers and ranchers, says The Washington Post.
Since he told 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 Post says.
Williams ordered the court’s clerk to send copies of her ruling to the attorney disciplinary bodies in New York and Washington, 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 on the agreement between the Trumps and the IRS, the Post says.
In addition to Blanche, Williams referred one of Trump’s attorneys, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary action. And she restricted the ability of a second lawyer, Daniel Epstein, to practice in the Southern District of Florida.
The “extraordinary order” from Williams came in response to concerns raised by 35 former federal judges, who had petitioned her to reexamine the deal the Justice Department struck with Trump in May to resolve the suit, notes the Post.
Here is the text of Williams’ ruling.
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