(Aug 1): President Donald Trump is appealing a court order barring him from attempting to use a sweeping audit-immunity settlement that resolved his US$10 billion (RM40.83 billion) lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service.
Trump filed a notice of appeal in federal court in Miami on Friday seeking to overturn the order as well as professional sanctions levied against his lawyer, Alejandro Brito, for bringing the litigation. It’s the latest twist in a suit Trump filed in January over the 2019 leak of his tax information to the press, making him the first president to sue his own government.
The ruling “threatens free speech, professional livelihoods, and the integrity of judicial proceedings,” Christopher Oprison, who represents Trump and Brito, said in the filing.
Meanwhile, the controversial settlement continues to be a roadblock to the confirmation of Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who signed off on the deal for the government, after key Republican lawmakers said they wouldn’t vote for him unless the immunity provision is narrowed in writing.
Trump, 80, is appealing a July ruling by US District Judge Kathleen Williams, who held that his suit against the IRS was a “bad faith” attempt to manipulate the court. Her ruling barred Trump and his administration from citing its supposed settlement in any future regulatory or judicial proceedings, saying the deal had “no viable basis in law or fact.”
In Friday’s filing, Oprison said the ruling by Williams “invokes serious concerns regarding fundamental tenets of justice and cannot stand.” He said he’d ask the federal appeals court in Atlanta to pause the ruling if the judge didn’t do it herself by Aug 5.
Central to the judge’s decision was her finding that Trump as president had improper control over both sides of the litigation, violating a constitutional requirement that parties in federal litigation be adverse to each other.
Oprison, in the filing, argued that Williams’ “ruling rests on a grievous legal error: that, because President Trump supervises the Executive Branch, he and the US necessarily possess the same legal interest and cannot be adverse to each other. That is wrong.”
In her 56-page decision, the judge called into question whether Trump, his family members or business interests will be able to benefit from the controversial settlement, which would immunize them from audits or other federal probes related to past filings.
The settlement also included a now-scrapped US$1.8 billion “anti-weaponisation” fund, which was dropped amid a bipartisan outcry.
Trump sued the IRS and the US Treasury in January over the unauthorised leak of his tax information to the press in 2019. The Justice Department, which represents the IRS and typically vigorously defends claims against the government, never responded to the suit in court.
“The facts before this court demonstrate there was never adverseness between the parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail,” Williams wrote in her decision. “The court expressly finds that plaintiffs acted in bad faith.”
The judge said it was clear that Trump and his administration intended to settle all along, finding that the “matter was brought for an improper purpose — to gain the imprimatur of judicial legitimacy for a ‘settlement’ that had no viable basis in law or fact.”
The Justice Department previously released a statement denying “collusion” between Trump and the government and alleging that “the partisan judge who speculated otherwise has disregarded decades of precedent.”
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