A federal judge in Florida has sanctioned two of Donald Trump’s lawyers and torn apart the legal settlement that let the president escape tax investigations while creating a $1.8 billion fund for his political allies.
“This action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute,” District Judge Kathleen Williams wrote in a blistering order filed Monday. Trump’s lawyers, she said, schemed to “gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.”
The case began when Trump sued his own administration, specifically the IRS, for $10 billion, claiming the agency had been “weaponized” against him. His personal lawyers squared off against his own Department of Justice in a bizarre spectacle of a president suing his own government.
Under the settlement that followed, the IRS agreed to drop all tax investigations into Trump, his family, and his businesses. The deal also created the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”, a $1.776 billion compensation pool meant to pay out to alleged victims of government overreach, including January 6 defendants and close Trump allies.
Judge Williams was not fooled. She said the fund looked more like a “branding” effort than a “deliberate and thoughtful calculation of damages.” The entire lawsuit, she concluded, was filed “for an improper purpose.”
She referred Trump lawyer Alejandro Britto to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary action. Another attorney, Daniel Z. Epstein, is barred from joining cases in the district for at least a year.
The settlement unraveled after 35 former federal judges urged Williams to open the case. “The court was deceived,” they wrote, arguing that Trump and the IRS had essentially laundered a settlement through the court’s credibility.
After Trump dropped his lawsuit, the Justice Department issued a memo granting the president immunity from tax investigations, an arrangement critics say amounts to a president buying himself legal cover by manipulating the courts.
Williams’s order is unlikely to be the last word. The judge sanctioned two attorneys who secured a settlement that critics have described as a president using the courts to shield himself from tax investigations while directing taxpayer money to political allies.