Federal judge slams Trump's fake IRS settlement, orders sanctions for attorneys involved

Back in May—several hundred scandals ago, admittedly—Donald Trump's crooked Department of Justice and Donald Trump's crooked private lawyers—the ones not yet appointed to government positions, I mean, not the phalanx of insurrection-aiding national security secrets-stealing rape-apologizing bullshit production robots who've already aken up key government spots as reward for their crookedness—announced that they had reached a settlement in Donald Trump's private lawsuit against Donald Trump's IRS.

The short version of the deal was this: As an apology for allegedly allowing somebody in the IRS to allegedly leak some of Trump's alleged tax information, after he first won the presidency and refused to show his alleged taxes like every past modern president has, the IRS would promise that it would stop investigating Trump's past tax returns and never launch any new investigations into Trump's past tax returns. Or those of his family. Or those of his business parters. Or his dog, if Trump wasn't a soulless sack of crap who hates dogs and every other animal he's not allowed to have sex with.

Not that there's anything our resident antichrist wants to hide, in those old financial dealings that experts have repeatedly described as dodgy to the likely point of bank fraud. Heavens no.

The other part of the "deal," of course, was that Trump's Treasury Department would open a $1.8 billion slush fund managed by a Trump-appointed committee to pay off large cash settlements to all of the people who've been indicted or convicted for federal crimes they've done on Trump's behalf. This was to include both the many members of Trump's past legal teams caught up in such crimes, loyal ratfuckers like the gargoyle Rudy Giuliani, who invented a barrage of hoaxes to target Trump's enemies and the integrity of our elections, and the violent militia members who attacked Congress and the officers protecting them during Trump's Jan. 6 insurrection. $1.8 billion to be handed out to felons who did crimes for Trump, both to reward them and to encourage Trump's current supporters into doing crimes for him in the future, if he needs it.

All of that was horribly obviously crooked, of course, and the $1.8 billion fund ran into even some Senate Republican opposition after acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and the rest of Trump's crew refused to promise that they wouldn't use the funds to pay off insurrectionists who violently attacked cops that day. It was all so crooked that it was difficult for anyone anywhere to pretend it was anything other than crooked, and if we were a proper country we would have at the very least Nixoned our national disgrace into retirement.

It was so crooked, in fact, that the federal judge who was hearing the original Trump "lawsuit" that led to the "settlement" has now authored a blistering opinion condemning the crookedness and ordering sanctions for some of the lawyers involved.

The issue before the Court is whether, instead, they ignored ethical norms, court rules, and legal authority to manipulate the judicial process. The issue is whether they did so to gild their efforts to gain unprecedented access to the public fisc with the patina of legitimacy. There is nothing “ordinary” about this case; it is the very definition of sui generis.

The heart of the ruling: The two parties in the case were never in conflict. Both sides were coordinating to use the courts to produce their desired pro-Trump outcome. Blanche's self-authorized order prohibiting all "current or possible" investigations of Trump and his clan is plainly illegal.

Blanche gets considerable attention in the ruling, in fact, with judge Kathleen Williams coming real damn close to calling him crooked to his face.

Another signal that adverseness was absent was Acting Attorney General Blanche’s unilateral repudiation and severance of the purported “Anti-Weaponization Fund” associated with this lawsuit.55 Two weeks after the dismissal, in testimony before the House of Representatives, Acting Attorney General Blanche conceded that the DOJ was “not moving forward with the fund, period.”56 Acting Attorney General Blanche’s decision, which has not been memorialized or adopted by Plaintiffs57 or their lawyers, demonstrates his confidence that he could speak for, and bind, both sides of this matter. This certitude supports the conclusion that the Parties worked in tandem and were never actually adverse.

Yeah, the judge is real sure this was all crooked from the get-go and that Todd Blanche was one of the head crooks in charge of it all.

[W]hile it is true that President Trump had a legal right to bring a suit for the unlawful disclosure, any remedy would be circumscribed by the legal guardrails applicable to all litigants: the statute of limitations, naming the appropriate defendant, and pleading special recoverable damages. 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. 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.” It is risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties.

In the end, Williams orders sanctions against two named individuals: Trump attorney Alejandro Brito is referred to the Florida Bar for a determination as to possible disciplinary actions for Filing This Nonsense, and pro-Trump advocate Daniel Epstein (different Epstein, y'all) is barred from appearances in the Southern District of Florida for the next year. She invites those who filed amicus briefings with the court—including the 35 former federal judges who called shenanigans on this crookery and urged the court to find the supposed "settlement" invalid—to file for monetary reimbursement.

The judge also orders that her order be sent to the State Bar of New York, which is already engaged in disciplinary review of Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, in the obvious hopes that eventually all of this brazen crookedness will catch up with them both.

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.

Now as for what will happen next, in all of this, the answers are unknown. Merely pointing out that Trump's once-lawyers turned government lackeys are trying to embezzle federal funds for the purposes of boosting pro-Trump criminals will get you nowhere, with a Republican-led Congress all wearing matching "Stealing Government Money Is Awesome Now" t-shirts and novelty pins. This is especially true after the Supreme Court's decree in the aptly-named Trump v. United States clarifying that Republican presidents can order their underlings to commit whatever crimes he wants committed, so long as he burps out a "because America" somewhere in the order.

In the end, what all of this mostly does is add to the chain of rulings that confirm that (1) Donald Trump is violating laws with reckless abandon, (2) his hand-picked toadies are violating those same laws with the same abandon, and (3) every federal courtroom in America save for the fanciest and crookedest one knows it.

After Trump departs the Oval Office, however that happens, both federal courts and the general public will want vengeance for all of this. And it's not terribly likely Trump has pre-written pardons for all of his crooks, because historically he's preferred leaving them dangling as means of ensuring their continued loyalty.

So we'll see. But as for the $1.8 billion slush fund for felons and the plainly unlawful "agreement" to never ever investigate Trump's sketchy tax filings again, they're both nixed for being crooked. Not just a little crooked, but so crooked that the government and not-government lawyers who filed this nonsense have now been referred to their state bars for trying it.

You're not crazy for thinking these people are crooks, in other words. The people whose job it is to decide who's crooked and who's not think so too, and their version of the argument comes with footnotes.