A federal judge who refused to pause her sanctions order against President Donald Trump and his attorneys for filing a “collusive” IRS lawsuit with “no viable basis in law or fact” also took aim at an attempt to “mischaracterize” her ruling. With the stay denial now on appeal, the president’s private lawyers and the Department of Justice are working together.
In a brief filing at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday, Trump’s private attorneys from DLA Piper LLP said they agreed with the DOJ’s filing made four days earlier. That filing demanded an “immediate stay” of U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ “unprecedented, unconstitutional sanctions.”
Two weeks ago, Williams rejected “each argument” for staying the “imposition of three sanctions” as “unpersuasive.” The sanctions include a bar referral and attorneys’ fees that she allowed 35 former federal judges and ex-IRS and Treasury officials to seek from Trump. The group had opposed the lawsuit as amici curiae, or friends of the court.
Williams, an appointee of Barack Obama, once ordered Florida to shut down “Alligator Alcatraz,” only to be reversed by the 11th Circuit. She stood by her “detailed findings” that the president’s attorneys filed a “collusive” lawsuit to “manipulate the judicial process.” She said the case gave a veneer of legitimacy to a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund and a “settlement” that would shield the Trump family and the president from backward-looking tax probes.
On Monday, Trump’s attorneys argued that Williams had created a “categorical rule” barring a sitting chief executive from suing the government he leads, pointing to her statement that he “could have” filed the same suit “while a private citizen.”
That made “clear that the purported defect turned not on the claims asserted, but on President Trump’s status while asserting them,” the response claimed.
Williams had already rejected that framing in her order.
“The Movants mischaracterize the Sanctions Order as establishing a brightline rule ‘that a President who sues the Executive agency is necessarily suing himself,'” the judge said. “This is incorrect; the Sanctions Order established no such categorical rule. On the contrary, the Sanctions Order acknowledged that Lead Plaintiff did have a right to sue and could have done so, without issue, during the lawfully specified time and while a private citizen.”
The judge was referring to the statute of limitations.
In her July sanctions order, Williams said it “is true that President Trump had a legal right to bring a suit for the unlawful disclosure” of his tax returns, but he did not do so in time.
“Notably, had President Trump (and his then-lawyers Alina Habba and Todd Blanche) brought this lawsuit in a timely fashion while he was a private citizen, this litigation understandably might have been resolved in a 109-day time span,” the judge said. “But that is not what happened. Instead, President Trump did not pursue his claims until he once again occupied the White House and had appointed his former lawyer, and the former lawyer of persons who are putative beneficiaries of the ‘Anti-Weaponization Fund’ to prominent positions in the DOJ.”
“These officials then negotiated on behalf of the United States, with his current lawyers, including his former White House Counsel to reach a ‘settlement,'” the judge said as she recounted the sequence of events. She added that it was “risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between” Trump as an individual and his administration’s IRS.
The DOJ has countered that Williams’ “wrong” and “illogical” order threatens to unleash an “onslaught of sanctions motions and orders against every claim, lawyer, party, or settlement that any interloper or district judge personally dislikes—precedent, logic, jurisdiction, the Constitution, and the facts all be damned.”