A Florida federal judge, in one of the most blistering public criticisms yet of a sitting President, ruled Monday that Donald Trump gravely misused the court system to benefit himself, his family, his business and their friends and allies.
The judge all but erased the legal basis for the $1.8 billion “slush fund” set up this year by Trump and his Administration. That fund, the judge found, was created as a way to settle a bogus lawsuit that the Trumps had filed – a lawsuit against the government by Trump as the head of that government, in effect suing himself. Without that lawsuit, there would have been no option to create that fund.
The Constitution itself, according to the ruling, forbids the federal courts from deciding any such “collusive” lawsuit.
“This lawsuit,” U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams of Miami wrote in a 56-page opinion, “was not brought to vindicate rights; it was brought to manipulate the judicial process to pursue benefits” that could not have been won in a regular lawsuit unless there were actually two sides, not just one controlled by the President.
Aside from cataloguing a wide range of ethical misconduct by Trump’s lawyers, done at his direction, the judge declared that the “slush fund” and a sweeping grant of legal immunity to Trump, his family and his business would have violated the Constitution’s ban on a President taking any benefits except an official salary. The judge blocked Trump and anyone else in government from taking any steps to put the fund into operation.
Judge Williams handed out a series of formal sanctions, including steps that could require Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and one of his top assistants to defend their right to continue practicing law. The judge sent her ruling to the bar associations where Blanche (New York) and Assistant Attorney General Stanley Woodward (Washington, D.C.) are licensed. Both already have been challenged in disciplinary cases.
The searing critique of Blanche in the judge’s opinion almost certainly will become a factor when Blanche goes before Congress as President Trump’s nominee to formally become Attorney General.
Among other sanctions by the judge:
· A prominent commercial lawyer in Coral Gables, Fla., Alejandro Brito, was referred to the Florida Bar to decide on any disciplinary actions. He was one of two lawyers who filed the original case for Trump, his two sons and his business, in the lawsuit in Judge Williams’ court.
· The other lawyer who joined with Brito in suing, former White House lawyer Daniel Z. Epstein, now a Washington attorney, was barred for one year from filing legal papers as an attorney in any case in the court where Williams sits.
· The Trumps, their business firm and other government officials found to have been involved in the manipulations were ordered to reimburse a private advocacy group that was taking part in the review of the settled lawsuit, to cover its attorneys’ fees.
· While the judge also would have imposed a return of attorneys’ fees to a small group of high-profile lawyers that the judge had appointed to give legal advice on the settled lawsuit, but those lawyers declined to accept reimbursement.
· The judge told a group of 35 retired federal judges, who had volunteered to take part in the case to challenge the Trump lawsuit and the settlement fund, to file a request to recover attorneys’ fees, if they wished.
The judge confined her decision – but only for now – to the question of whether the legal maneuvering violated a federal court rule (Rule 11) that bars attorneys from filing frivolous lawsuits or pleadings in the federal courts. In a footnote, the judge said she was keeping open another option: enforcing another court rule (Rule 60). That allows the judge to reopen a closed case that has involved fraud. If she were to act on that, it might lead to a ruling that could limit Trump’s options of finding a new way to have his allies paid by the Treasury.
Monday’s opinion went into every detail of how the Trump lawsuit began, frivolously, as a claim for $10 billion in damages against the Internal Revenue Service for allowing the public disclosure of some of the Trumps’ tax returns, then resulted quickly in a settlement – designed to remove the case from Williams’ court – that produced the “slush fund.”
The fund was given the name the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” as a way to transfer nearly $1.8 billion from the U.S. Treasury to anyone who could show that they had been improperly targeted for investigation or criminal prosecution by the Biden Administration.
Trump, his two oldest sons and the main family business, the Trump Organization, would not get any of those payments, but they were separately granted – by Acting Attorney General Blanche – a wide-ranging immunity extending “forever” from facing any tax audits or any other financial claim that the government might have against them.
The fact that Blanche, acting alone, felt free to confer that kind of immunity on the Trumps was proof, the judge found, that the entire settlement was done as a group effort on behalf of the President and those close to or allied with him.
Judge Williams noted, without accepting, the claim by Blanche in congressional testimony that the Treasury payment part of the Fund was now closed down. But she also noted that Blanches has not said the same thing about the promised “forever” immunity.
A significant part of the legal grounding of Judge Williams’ ruling was her declaration – supported, she said, by recent Supreme Court rulings – that the President as head of the entire Executive Branch has complete control over all parts of that Branch, giving him the opportunity to manage both sides of his lawsuit against the IRS.
The judge was also severely critical of the behavior of the Justice Department as a whole in the entire manipulative incident, abandoning – she said – its obligation to defend the interests of the U.S. government against the Trumps’ lawsuit.
It is unclear, at this stage, what legal options Trump and his allies have to challenge what Judge Williams has done. She pointed out that federal judges have broad “inherent authority” to take action to protect the integrity of their courts and the legal system as a whole.
