Ahead of Blanche Hearing, Judge Says Trump Tried to ‘Manipulate the Judicial Process’ With IRS Settlement
This is your TPM evening briefing.
A judge has reached the same conclusion as many others about President Trump’s attempt to loot the Treasury to line the pockets of his supporters and political allies. Her findings were outlined in a scathing new decision Monday.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams — an Obama appointee in Miami — slammed Trump’s settlement agreement with the IRS, saying the lawsuit was filed for an “improper purpose” and describing the whole arrangement as a practice in self-dealing.
“After a review of the record, and the Parties’ statements, the Court declines to adopt or accept the credulous exercise of divorcing President Trump’s current job title from an understanding of what happened here,” she said.
“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,” Williams wrote in her decision.
Williams found that Trump essentially tried to manipulate the court system when he sued the IRS, a federal agency of his own government, and therefore ultimately settled with himself. Williams said Trump failed to prove the baseline adverse interests necessary for a lawsuit to move forward. As part of the settlement agreement with his own IRS — which he sued over the leak of his tax returns years ago — Trump created the “anti-weaponization fund,” a cartoonishly corrupt $1.8 billion slush fund the administration initially said it would use to compensate people who felt they’d been targeted by federal law enforcement during the Biden administration. Elected Republicans and Democrats alike raised concerns about whether the fund would be used to compensate Trump’s allies and friends who may have had a role in storming the Capitol, including those who were charged for assaulting law enforcement.
The settlement agreement slush fund sparked such widespread condemnation from within the Republican Party that acting Attorney General Todd Blanche declared in Senate testimony in June that the slush fund was dead. But haziness has lingered around whether Trump himself actually agreed to scrap the plan and abide by court orders temporarily blocking it — or whether the DOJ would attempt to somehow resurrect it, or find a new way to accomplish the same thing. There was so much outrage about the fund among Senate Republicans that Republican leadership was considering placing guardrails on the fund via amendments in the ICE-funding reconciliation package that they passed earlier this summer.
In her decision on Monday, Williams also referred some of the attorneys involved in the settlement agreement, including Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, for potential discipline. She wrote that a copy of her findings would be sent to bar associations in New York and Washington, D.C., “where disciplinary proceedings are currently ongoing” against Blanche and Woodward.
“Acting Attorney General Blanche’s apparent capacity to speak for both Plaintiffs and Defendants, sign a ‘settlement’ document on behalf of all Parties to this action, and then repudiate part of that agreement, demonstrates that there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case,” she wrote.
It’s a less than ideal series of events for Blanche on a big week, when he is probably desperate to get lawmakers to focus on anything but the slush fund — the main Trump admin action he’s taken, thus far at least, that is giving Republicans enough pause that it could jeopardize his confirmation. Both Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) are on the Senate Judiciary Committee and on their way out the door. Both have suggested that they see Blanche’s role in the creation of the fund as a vulnerability for his nomination.
DNI Is Involved in Some Sort of White House Election Task Force Doc Dump
President Trump has been hijacking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for the purpose of feeding his 2020 election delusions for months now. Back when the FBI raided Fulton County for its 2020 election records, Trump sent then-DNI Tulsi Gabbard to the scene of the raid for unclear reasons. She ended up serving as a conduit between the agents seizing the materials and Trump, even putting him on the phone with them at one point.
MSNOW reports this morning that there is a new White House task force that will be reviewing and releasing classified intelligence and documents from federal law enforcement in coming days and weeks that will, apparently, show the fruits of their search for “irregularities” in the election system, in MSNOW’s words. Bill Pulte, whom Trump appointed as acting DNI despite having zero intelligence experience, will apparently have a role in this effort.
The apparent coming release of these documents comes as the FBI recently enlisted backup to help it comb through the records it seized from Fulton County in an attempt to drum up some sort of evidence of the supposedly rampant fraud that Trump believes is behind his loss in 2020. This new data dump is potentially part of a strategy to continue degrading Americans’ trust in their own state election administrators’ ability to run elections, per MSNOW:
Election security experts and election officials have long expected the Trump administration to release more government documents in an attempt to flood the information ecosystem with false conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — all with an eye toward sowing confusion about future elections.
Come Hang With TPM
TPM is hosting a discussion on July 29 at Crystal Lake Brooklyn centered on how independent media is faring in an era when billionaires are buying up legacy media outlets and journalists across the nation are losing their jobs. My boss, Josh Marshall, will discuss this with The Handbasket founder Marisa Kabas.
I’m also going to host some trivia with my co-editor Allegra Kirkland ahead of the discussion — so come on out, have a few drinks and show off your political genius, too.
Some More to Read From TPM Today
John Light notes that Trump is so obsessively fixated on the SAVE America Act getting passed in a Congress it won’t pass, that some of his first remarks on the unexpected death of Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) on Saturday were about the SAVE Act and how it’ll be even harder to pass now: The Brief: Trump Says Graham’s Final Conversation With Him Was About the SAVE Act
The kooks, the state politicians and the Trump golfing partners — Emine Yücel has all you need to know about the race to replace Graham that is taking over Republican circles across South Carolina: The Unofficial List of Republicans Who May Throw Their Hat in the Ring to Replace Lindsey Graham
Layla A. Jones has a new piece out this morning unpacking the Trump administration’s ban on privacy protections at the Census Bureau: Right-Wing Groups Just Got a Big Win on the Census
Yesterday’s Top Story
Lindsey Graham Always Needed a Daddy
What I’m Reading
Trump sends authoritarian signal by extending D.C.’s National Guard presence
Lindsey Graham and the rot of modern conservatism
The Republicans’ Congressional Mess Just Got Even Worse
This article has been corrected to more precisely describe details in the judge's ruling.
Great news about the ruling, but I am in some ways more concerned about the blanket immunity that Trump et al could get from the IRS. Is that challengeable?