“This lawsuit was not brought to vindicate rights,” U.S. District Court Judge Kathleen Williams wrote, adding, “It was brought to manipulate the judicial process to pursue benefits unavailable in litigation.”
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U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams was skeptical. The case before her purported to be between the IRS and a group of private citizens harmed by a leak of their tax returns. The eye-popping $10 billion in relief they were seeking was wild on its own. But among the plaintiffs was President Donald Trump, who oversees both the IRS and the Justice Department lawyers who would be defending the government’s interests. Or rather they should be defending the government’s interests — because as Williams determined in a scathing ruling Monday, there was never any real conflict for her court to adjudicate.
Instead, as Williams noted in her 56-page order, Trump effectively controlled both sides of the lawsuit at all points, rendering it ineligible for relief from the court system.
The “settlement,” which authorized a $1.776 billion slush fund and granted amnesty to the president and his family from IRS audits, including any that may have already begun on tax returns for last year, was already the most likely outcome before a single brief had been filed from the defendants. In her total rejection of the case, Williams has rightly refused to allow America’s courts to be a fig leaf for Trump to enrich himself and his allies......
As Williams noted:
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 Lead Plaintiff and the Government are one, a fully realized unitary interest.[/blockquote]
Williams did order sanctions against the lawyers who filed the suit on Trump’s behalf. That included banning all parties from referring to the “settlement” as legitimate in any future legal proceeding. She also ordered copies of her decision to the bar associations in New York and the District of Columbia, where Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward — who also signed off on the “settlement” — are respectively facing disciplinary hearings regarding unrelated complaints.
Williams provided a forceful declaration that sham lawsuits have no place in the court system, especially those that would benefit the president directly. It is a shame though that Williams’ superiors at the Supreme Court have all but ruled out any sort of consequences for this malfeasance reaching Trump. Under any reasonable legal system, the person who stood most to benefit from this fraud of a lawsuit should be able to be held accountable. Instead, we live in the world of inherent presidential immunity, even in instances he had hoped to order the government he runs to deposit billions in his bank account.
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