President Donald Trump on July 31 formally appealed a federal judge’s ruling that found his lawsuit against the IRS over a leak of his tax returns was collusive self-dealing filed for an “improper purpose.”
Trump had voluntarily dismissed the $10 billion lawsuit in May when he settled the case.
The Trump administration agreed to create a nearly $1.8 billion Anti-Weaponization Fund designed to compensate victims of politicized law enforcement. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) later abandoned the fund amid bipartisan criticism and challenges in court.
The appeal will go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. The notice does not spell out why the litigants are appealing.
Since Trump exercises authority over the IRS and the DOJ as president in a lawsuit he filed in his personal capacity, the interests of the litigants were not truly opposed to each other as is required in civil lawsuits, she held.
The lawsuit “was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute,” Williams said.
Trump denied the settlement was an example of self-dealing, arguing that the fund was part of a legitimate effort to secure government accountability by compensating victims of lawfare and allegedly politically motivated prosecutions during President Joe Biden’s term and before.
Trump and his legal team had said the tax leak and subsequent investigations were part of a broader trend in which federal agencies were weaponized against Trump. The president’s supporters say the lawsuit was needed to deal with those investigations they alleged were aimed at undermining his political effectiveness.
Williams said “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.”
The judge said the plaintiffs acted in bad faith and initiated a lawsuit “to provide cover for a collusive settlement,” for “improper purpose of dishonestly advancing a political narrative,” and to obtain “the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.”
The lawsuit is “part of Mr. Trump’s pattern of misusing the courts to serve political purposes,” she added.
Williams had criticized the president’s lawyers, referring one for disciplinary review and denying another the ability to act in the case for one year.
She also barred Trump, his sons, and the family business from referring to or citing the settlement agreement in any future legal proceeding. This appears to undercut the provisions of the settlement that granted protections to the plaintiffs, such as blocking IRS audits or investigations into past tax matters.
The attorneys said in the motion that they are seeking fast-tracked consideration of the motion and that if the district court fails to rule by Aug. 5 they will seek the same stay from the 11th Circuit “to protect their rights and avoid the continuing and irreversible harm resulting from the Sanctions Order.”
The sanctions order was made without proper process and “invokes serious concerns regarding fundamental tenets of justice and cannot stand,” they said.
That order builds on the “grievous legal error” that because Trump oversees the executive branch of the federal government, he and the United States “necessarily possess the same legal interest and cannot be adverse to each other,” the motion said.
Trump raised a personal claim related to the theft of his tax information, and the IRS and the U.S. Department of the Treasury “represented the sovereign’s interests in public funds and federal law,” the motion stated.
Trump, his sons Donald Jr. and Eric, and the Trump Organization advanced their own independent claims, and the fact of “presidential supervision did not erase those rights or merge those interests.”
The motion also argues that barring the plaintiffs from referencing the settlement is a content-based prior restraint forbidden by the First Amendment.
The appeals court is “overwhelmingly likely to vacate” the sanctions order, the motion said.
A spokesman for Trump’s legal team said the IRS “wrongly allowed a rogue, politically motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people.”
“President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable,” he told The Epoch Times.
At the same time, he acknowledged, at a cabinet meeting, that the Anti-Weaponization Fund is “dead.”
“But I wish it weren’t, to be honest with you. I think people were horribly treated, horribly abused … and I’d like to see them compensated for their pain.
“Their families have been ruined. Many, many suicides—they’ve committed suicide,” he said in the meeting, which was held at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland.
“People that were very successful, that wanted to go to a rally or an event and ended up spending the rest of their lives in horror.
“And this fund, this fund was not for me,” he said. “This fund was for those people.”
