An Obama-appointed federal judge voided the Trump administration's settlement over the illegal leak of the president's tax returns, sanctioned his lawyers, and referred a DOJ attorney for disciplinary action Monday — the latest example of the robe-wearing resistance working to hamstring Trump's agenda from the bench.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, nominated by Barack Obama, ruled that Trump's $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS was filed in "bad faith" and for "an improper purpose" — to manufacture judicial cover for a settlement with his own Justice Department. She referred Trump attorney Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar for potential discipline and barred attorney Daniel Epstein, vice president of America First Legal, from practicing in the Southern District of Florida for at least a year. She also directed copies of her 56-page order to the bar associations where Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate AG Stanley Woodward are members.
The underlying wrong was real. IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn leaked Trump's private tax information to the New York Times and ProPublica before the 2020 election. 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."
The May settlement would have created a $1.776 billion "anti-weaponization" fund to compensate Americans targeted by government abuse and granted Trump, his sons, and the Trump Organization immunity from future IRS audits. After bipartisan backlash in Congress, Blanche announced the fund was scrapped — but the audit immunity provision stayed in place.
Williams said there was never a genuine legal dispute because Trump controls the agencies he sued. "It is risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties," she wrote. She noted Blanche's apparent capacity to "speak for both plaintiffs and defendants" and "sign a 'settlement' document on behalf of all parties to this action, and then repudiate part of that agreement" proved only one side's interests were represented.
The case was reopened at the urging of 35 retired federal judges who called the settlement "the product of collusion" and "a fraud on the court."
What the establishment outlets cheering this ruling won't mention: this is the same federal judiciary that mustered no such urgency when the Biden IRS was caught targeting conservative nonprofits. No Obama-appointed judge sanctioned anyone over that systematic harassment. No retired judges filed amicus briefs crying fraud when Lois Lerner's agency stalled tax-exempt applications for Tea Party groups for years. The robes only rediscover their courage when Donald Trump sits in the crosshairs.
That said, a president suing agencies he controls, then settling with his own appointees to extract personal tax audit immunity and nearly $2 billion in taxpayer funds, is not the kind of arrangement the Founders would have toasted. The anti-weaponization fund addressed a real problem — Americans have been abused by their own government — but wrapping your family's audit protection into it invited exactly this kind of judicial intervention.
Williams' order now blocks all parties from citing the settlement in any proceeding, which means the audit immunity is likely gone too. But the underlying crime — a government contractor handing a sitting president's private tax data to hostile media outlets — still lacks a real remedy. The judiciary that sat on its hands during Biden's IRS targeting has now found the will to punish Trump's lawyers. The leak that started all of this? Still unremedied. That's the open question no one in black robes seems interested in answering.
