This post is exclusive to paid subscribers as part of my every-once-in-a-while deep dive into a legal or political issue. I’ve been covering Trump’s collusive IRS lawsuit from the jump, and yesterday’s Eleventh Circuit ruling was a substantial reversal for Trump and the DOJ’s scheme.
Yesterday’s per curiam order by the Eleventh Circuit declining to grant a stay has landed Trump and the Department of Justice in the last place they wanted to be: before District Court Judge Kathleen Williams, who already has determined that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was collusive and brought in bad faith. The court of appeals rebuffed Trump’s emergency appeal to put the proceedings in Williams’s court on ice.
Williams now is able to proceed to develop the facts and assess penalties against the lawyers and the parties. Most importantly, she is now riding point on the question of the legality of the whole multi-billion-dollar scheme. If, as seems likely, she holds the settlement collusive, it leaves Trump and the DOJ with far less room than generally realized to carry out the whole bogus arrangement.
In particular, it defeats the core idea of the collusion, which was to vault over the courts: to pocket all the benefits of a court settlement without ever letting a judge take a look. And the voluntary dismissal was calibrated to achieve just that.
The scheme began to unravel in July, when Williams, acting on the motion of 35 former federal judges, found that Trump controlled both sides of the lawsuit and brought it in bad faith, to provide cover for a collusive settlement. She convened a separate proceeding under Rule 11, which requires lawyers to certify that court filings have a proper purpose and a reasonable factual basis
But Williams also moved carefully. She declined to order discovery, held off on attorneys’ fees, and made clear that her order “should not be understood as a final determination regarding any fraud perpetrated on the court.” It was a preliminary finding, and she left herself room to finish the job.
The DOJ, for its part, chose to studiously ignore the case. In his confirmation hearing, Blanche dismissed Judge Williams’s decision with a wave of the hand and an indication that he understood Eleventh Circuit law better than Williams. That was breathtakingly disrespectful to the court in a way that largely escaped notice with all the other controversies Blanche was navigating.
