A federal judge in Florida just took a torch to the legal fiction Donald J. Trump built to make his own DOJ settlement look legitimate, CNBC reports.
In a scathing ruling Monday, Judge Kathleen Williams said the President’s lawsuit against the IRS wasn’t a real dispute — it was simply theater, filed for the express purpose of dressing up a settlement in a robe of “judicial legitimacy” it never earned. That could sum up Trump’s entire presidency, really.
Which, notably, is a settlement between two entities that Trump effectively runs, so the suit was less ‘David v. Goliath’ and much more of a ‘Trump v. Trump,’ with Trump as the tiebreaker. Confused? Well, so is this country and the world over any of Trump’s actions, and in this case, he seems to ‘forget’ that he’s the President, not a victim.
Williams didn’t stop at scolding. She went further, referring Trump’s own attorney, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar to face possible discipline. Then, apparently unwilling to let anyone off easy, she had copies of the order mailed directly to the State Bar of New York (where Acting AG Todd Blanche is licensed) and the D.C. Bar (home to Associate AG Stanley Woodward) — basically a judicial “cc: everyone” on a memo that absolutely nobody in the DOJ wanted sent.
Trump’s legal team, for their part, responded to none of this. Instead, a spokesman recycled the initial one grievance about the IRS leak to the press, insisting Trump is simply “holding accountable” the people who wronged him — which, again, is not actually what the judge ruled on. Somewhere in that gap between the ruling and the response is the entire strategy.
The Trump team’s response sidesteps the “improper purpose” finding entirely — it re-argues the preliminary grievance (the Littlejohn leak) rather than addressing the collusion/legitimacy question Williams actually ruled on. Good try, guys.
We’ve covered Trump’s IRS lawsuit before, noting that “his leaked returns showed that the overprivileged grifter paid next to nothing in taxes some years, lost a fuck-ton on his “genius” businesses, and it generally made him look less like a billionaire mogul and more like a walking tax-loss harvesting machine.”
Yeah, so that’s why he’s mad. Trump was exposed, and nothing rattles a narcissist more than having his mask slip off publicly. And nothing brings more joy to decent people than seeing a raging, self-entitled narcissist’s mask fall right the fuck off.
