U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams ruled Monday that President Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service was filed for an "improper purpose," calling the case an exercise in self-dealing and referring one of his lawyers for possible discipline [1]. Trump sued the IRS and Treasury Department in January over the leak of his tax information to news outlets between 2018 and 2020. Williams, an Obama appointee, found that he had manipulated the courts by suing a federal agency he controls, bypassing the rule that opposing parties in a suit must hold adverse interests.
The suit ended in a May settlement that granted Trump and his family immunity from tax audits and created a $1.776 billion "Anti-Weaponization Fund" to compensate people who believe the criminal justice system mistreated them. The fund was shelved within days amid bipartisan backlash, but the administration says it still intends to enforce the audit-immunity clause. Williams did not expressly void that clause.
The court's central objection was that no one on the government's side ever opposed Trump. "There was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case," Williams wrote, pointing to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche's claim that he could "speak for, and bind, both sides of this matter." Blanche had represented Trump before joining the Justice Department; Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, also involved in the settlement, had defended January 6 defendants. Williams called the arrangement an attempt to use the court "to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law" [1].
The ruling carries teeth. Williams referred Alejandro Brito, who filed the case, to the Florida state bar, and barred attorney Daniel Epstein from filing in the Southern District of Florida for up to a year. She ordered copies sent to the bars of New York and Washington, where ethics complaints against Blanche and Woodward are already pending. Blanche faces a Senate Judiciary confirmation hearing Wednesday.
Trump's team casts the settlement as redress for persecution and blamed the IRS for the leak, treating the shelved fund as a win withdrawn under pressure. Williams found the harder fact: the entire proceeding was a fiction staged to move public money and secure audit immunity. The fund is gone, but the audit protection is not — she never ruled on it.
-- ANNA WEBER, Berlin