President Donald Trump was dealt a harsh blow on Monday by a Florida judge who found that his nearly $18 billion slush fund was illegal and that the lawyers involved should face consequences for bringing such a case. According to CNN reporter Aaron Blake, this is all part of a larger wall that Trump's Justice Department keeps running into.
Judge Kathleen Williams said the so-called "settlement" between Trump and the IRS can't even be called a settlement. She saw through the scheme, saying that Trump’s IRS lawsuit was really designed to make an already desired deal look legitimate rather than to resolve an actual dispute.
“This lawsuit was not brought to vindicate rights; it was brought to manipulate the judicial process to pursue benefits unavailable in litigation because the Parties were not adverse,” Williams said.
The ruling is part of a broader pattern of judges willing to stand up to the Trump administration and bad-faith lawyering coming out of the Justice Department. It isn't the only one. Judge William M. Ray II, a Trump appointee, blocked a grand jury subpoena that would have allowed the FBI to target Fulton County election workers, calling it an “arbitrary fishing expedition.”
The judge further warned that federal prosecutors can't simply use grand juries to do whatever they want just because it's easy to do so. He added that the DOJ also shouldn't be allowed to take private data without a legitimate purpose.
“Everyone, whether you support the president or you do not, or whether you believe the 2020 election was fair or believe that it was not, should be concerned about the DOJ’s ability to utilize the power of the grand jury to appropriate your private information without a legitimate purpose,” Ray wrote.
Blake explained that this is part of a larger problem with Trump, as he faces off against judges around the country on both sides of the political aisle.
In a third case, Judge Patrick Schiltz, also appointed by a Republican, rejected subpoenas aimed at Minnesota state officials. The judge said it became clear that the subpoenas were intended to coerce state officials into assisting with immigration enforcement and as a form of retaliation for refusing to do so before. Another judge killed a subpoena involving Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell as part of the Trump administration's efforts to intimidate him into lowering interest rates.
The failures all stack up to show a sudden pattern in year two of the second Trump administration: judges simply don't trust the administration. They aren't merely losing cases; they're also drawing the ire of federal judges for abusing the legal system for political reasons. It could ultimately mean that Trump's greater efforts are going to slow considerably, and the only favorable ruling he could get is at the Supreme Court, and even that could be a long shot.
Blake closed saying that Trump's "throw everything at the wall" legal strategy "might not seem like a bad idea. But it risks the courts as a whole coming to believe that the administration simply isn’t a good-faith operator and isn’t even trying be a good steward of the law."
