I Read All 56 Pages of the Trump IRS Ruling. It's a $1.776 Billion Fraud on the Court, and on Every American Taxpayer.
Here's what the judge found about Todd Blanche, the Department of Justice, and Donald Trump, in her own words.
Executive Summary: A federal judge in Miami found that President Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS was a sham: because Trump controls the very agencies he sued, there were never two opposing sides, just one man on both, using the court to bless a private deal that would have handed his allies $1.776 billion in taxpayer money and shielded him and his family from future tax audits. The judge ruled the case was filed in “bad faith” for an “improper purpose,” and pointed out that the Justice Department, run by Trump’s own former personal lawyers, abandoned defenses it had won with in every similar case rather than fight its boss. She refused to let anyone treat the deal as a real settlement and referred the lawyers involved, including Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, for possible discipline.
I read all fifty-six pages of Judge Kathleen M. Williams’ order so you would not have to. I am going to hand you her words, not mine, and let you decide who is telling you the truth. The full order is linked at the end of this article in you’d like to read it.1
Suing Yourself For Ten Billion Dollars
Start with the shape of the thing, because the shape gives it away.
Trump, in the words of the order, “served as the 45th President of the United States, and is the 47th President of the United States.” He sued the IRS and the Treasury Department for “at least $10,000.000,000.00.” He filed it in what his lawyers had the nerve to call his “personal capacity,” and later described the case as “ordinary.”
Judge Williams refused to play along. She “decline[d] to adopt or accept the credulous exercise of divorcing President Trump’s current job title from an understanding of what happened here.” On the word “ordinary,” she called it “perhaps the most startling misstatement” in the whole proceeding, and she wrote, “There is nothing ‘ordinary’ about this case; it is the very definition of sui generis.”
And here’s why. The defendants, the IRS and Treasury, sit inside the Executive Branch. The head of that branch is the same man who filed the suit. The judge walked the chain of command one link at a time. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who also serves as Acting IRS Commissioner, is in the Supreme Court’s words “the President’s alter ego.” IRS CEO Frank Bisignano answers to Bessent. The President removes the IRS Commissioner “at the will of the President,” and the order points out he “has done so as recently as August 2025.”
Here is the moment the whole thing collapses. Trump’s own team already told the Supreme Court these officials “unquestionably exercise[] executive power, and must therefore be controlled by the Chief Executive.” Judge Williams caught it and held them to their own words. They do not get to claim total control in one courtroom and real opposition in another. “No person may sue himself,” she wrote. Trump said the same thing once, about a related matter, and she quoted it right back at him: “I’m suing myself.”
A plaintiff who controls the defendant is staging a play for the court. Courts, the judge reminded everyone, “do not engage in the academic pastime of rendering judgments in favor of persons against themselves.”
Picture it in one line. A president sued himself and tried to hand you the bill.
The Dog That Didn’t Bark
Here is the detail that should put a knot in your stomach, because it shows this was on purpose.
Every other time someone sued over this same tax leak, the Justice Department came out swinging. In the Griffin case. In the Safe Harbor case. The DOJ “zealously defended the government,” fighting the timing of the claims, fighting the damages, arguing the government was not even the right target. In the judge’s words, “In every case naming the government as a defendant, the DOJ engaged in a vigorous defense.”
Then, one sentence later, she drops the hammer: “That is, every case until the instant litigation.”
In Trump’s case, the government lay down. No answer. No appearance. No pleading of any kind. For 109 days, she found, “no attorney representing the United States filed a notice of appearance or any document indicating the government’s position, interest, or awareness of this matter.”
It gets worse. IRS officials had already written a 25-page memo “that outlined major flaws with Plaintiffs’ claims and listed the various defenses that could be advanced on behalf of Defendants.” The winning arguments were sitting in a drawer. The government had the memo in hand. It folded anyway and put its name to a deal worth $1.776 billion.2
Judge Williams drew the only inference a reasonable person draws. The government “failed to defend this lawsuit or to respond to the Court’s jurisdictional inquiry because its position would not withstand judicial scrutiny and because resolution of the threshold issues identified by the Court would not have favored its preferred outcome to this case.” You hold the winning hand and throw the game. The fix is in.
A Settlement Built to Dodge The Judge
The way they ended the case is its own scandal.
The judge had already spotted the jurisdiction problem and ordered both sides to brief it. Neither side did. Three days before the deadline, the parties filed a two-page notice of voluntary dismissal, telling the court it “automatically divested the Court of jurisdiction” and “no judicial analysis is appropriate.” Then the DOJ put out a press release with a “settlement agreement” no judge had ever seen, creating an “Anti-Weaponization Fund” to be paid out of the Treasury’s Judgment Fund for $1.776 billion.
The day after the dismissal, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche went before Congress. Someone asked why the settlement never went to the court for review. He answered that “there is no judge” because the case had been dismissed, so there was “no mechanism” for review.
Read how the judge answered that. She was “extremely troubled.” She called his explanation “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.” Then the clean truth: “The Court was available to review any pleading by any Party at any time during this lawsuit.” If Blanche believed the dismissal was wrong, “he only had to file an appearance and ask for relief.” He never did. Review was the one thing nobody in this deal wanted. The dismissal was the escape hatch.
The Number That Gives It Away
The payout was set at $1.776 billion. Not 1.7. Not 2. One point seven seven six.
The law for these tax-leak claims allows “$1,000 for each act of unauthorized inspection or disclosure.” The judge noted the plaintiffs “could make no connection between the billions of dollars they sought, and the recovery authorized under the governing statute.” So where did the number come from? She did not have to guess. “Even the Fund amount — $1.776 billion — speaks of a ‘branding’ effort rather than a deliberate and thoughtful calculation of damages.”
A flag-waving number, built for a headline, stapled to grievances the deal never even defined. The judge pointed out the words “Anti-Weaponization” and “Lawfare” were “inchoate,” with no “legal definition… outside their meaning in political discourse.” This was a slogan with a price tag, and you were the one on the hook for it.
The Lawyers And Their Conflicts
This is where it turns from improper to ugly, and where the order names names.
Look at the signatures. The “settlement” for the plaintiffs was signed by Daniel Epstein, a former White House Senior Associate Counsel and Special Assistant to President Trump. Epstein was never even counsel of record. His promised pro hac vice application never got filed. The judge “can only surmise that Mr. Epstein was aware that he would never need to appear and litigate the merits.” There were no merits to litigate.
The “settlement” for the defendants, supposedly the other side, was signed by Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward, Jr. and Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. Read who they are. Woodward represented January 6 defendants and Walt Nauta, Trump’s co-defendant in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. Blanche “served as President Trump’s personal criminal defense attorney” in the Mar-a-Lago case, the federal case charging Trump with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, and the New York “hush money” case.
Now follow the wire, the way the judge did. The settlement funds claims “arising from, inter alia, the Mar-a-Lago Documents Case and the events of January 6, 2021.” Those are the same matters where these same lawyers represented the people who stood to get paid. In her words, instead of “either recusing… because of their previous representations or vigorously defending this lawsuit as required to do so by DOJ policies and procedures, these lawyers agreed to a ‘settlement’ involving a staggering amount of money potentially benefitting former clients.”
She grounded it in the rulebook lawyers answer to. Quoting the commentary to Florida Bar Rule 4-1.11 on government lawyers, she flagged the danger “that power or discretion vested in that agency might be used for the special benefit of the other client,” and “[a] lawyer should not be in a position where benefit to the other client might affect performance of the lawyer’s professional functions on behalf of the government.” Her line: “The spectre of that risk seems to be present here.”
She added one more fact. Blanche had reportedly been told to recuse from DOJ matters involving Trump, and a DOJ spokeswoman confirmed he was “recused from many cases.” In this one, “notwithstanding his prior representation of President Trump, Blanche did not recuse.”
Breaking The Laws They Swore To Enforce
The order goes further and points to the actual statutes and constitutional lines the deal appears to cross.
The Release Order signed by Blanche tried to bar the IRS from ever auditing Trump, his sons, or their companies. Judge Williams pointed to 26 U.S.C. section 7217, a law titled “Prohibition on executive branch influence over taxpayer audits and other investigations,” which makes it “unlawful for any applicable person to request, directly or indirectly,” that the IRS “conduct or terminate an audit.” In her words, the statute “prohibits President Trump and his lawyers, one of whom was former White House Counsel, from asking for or promoting termination of an audit directed toward him. And acquiescing to any such demand is wholly incompatible with the duties of DOJ attorneys… to enforce the law and protect the public interest.”
She flagged the Constitution too. The President’s duty under Article II to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” The Emoluments limit in Article II, Section 1, keeping a president from taking extra payment during his term, a line “surely known by former White House Counsel and the current Acting Attorney General.” As she put it, “No sitting President has ever sued federal agencies completely subject to his control for monetary benefits… that inure to him, his family, and associates.” No lawyer in the case raised any of it on the docket, which she called “a glaring omission that speaks to the control of the Lead Plaintiff.”
The Tell They Could Not Hide
If you still need proof the two sides were one side, watch what happened after the deal.
Blanche later testified the DOJ was “not moving forward with the fund, period.” A settlement is a contract between two opposing parties, and one side does not get to erase it alone. As the judge noted, “a party may not unilaterally repudiate a settlement agreement once it is reached.” Blanche’s belief that he could speak for both sides, sign for both sides, then cancel part of it for both sides “demonstrates that there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case.” Around the same time, Trump told reporters he did not know if the fund was “fully dead or just on hold” and would “have to ask the lawyers.” Opposing parties do not share lawyers, and they do not share the same confusion.
And the detail that says everything: the order notes a DOJ official “publicly stated that he intended to apply for compensation from the Fund.” One of the people close to this deal was already reaching for the payout.
Final Analysis
Let me tell you where this ends up, and then I’ll show you exactly why.
That settlement is finished. Not one dollar is getting paid to anyone. And Trump, his sons, and their companies do not get a permanent pass on IRS audits. An appeal may happen but Trump and sons will lose.
Here is why.
As of today’s ruling, the “settlement” survives only as a private piece of paper the parties can no longer call a settlement or cite in any court; the fund it created has been abandoned and separately blocked; and the audit-immunity provision remains on paper but rests entirely on a unilateral DOJ order the judge found directly contravenes a federal statute.
Stripped of the settlement wrapper, that immunity agreement appears to rest on thin-to-nonexistent consideration flowing from Trump to the government, though that weakness is arguably the least of its problems, because the immunity may also fail for the illegality of its subject matter and for the government’s lack of authority to grant it, and any one of those defects could sink it on its own.
Trump can appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, arguing that the voluntary dismissal stripped the court of jurisdiction and that the findings and sanctions were improper, though the timing may depend on when the order becomes final, since the sanctions amount is still open. Even then, an appeal faces an uphill climb: Rule 11 and inherent-authority sanctions are reviewed for “abuse of discretion,” a deferential standard under which reversing a 56-page order this detailed is difficult, and pressing the appeal would force the administration to publicly defend a deal that already drew bipartisan criticism.
Why This Lands On You
The parties told the judge she had no power left, that the dismissal stripped her jurisdiction, that “there is no judge.” She answered that a court keeps the authority to police abuse of its own process, quoting the Eleventh Circuit: “Without them, abuses of the judicial system would go unchecked.” She found the plaintiffs “acted in bad faith and for an improper purpose by ‘collusively filing a lawsuit with claims subject to multiple dispositive defenses solely to provide cover for a collusive settlement.’” She found the case “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.” She wrote it flat: the plaintiffs “acted in bad faith.”
Then she acted. She referred Trump’s Florida lawyer, Alejandro Brito, to The Florida Bar. She barred Daniel Epstein from practicing in the district for a year. She forbade the parties from ever again calling this deal a “settlement” in any proceeding. She sent her order to the New York bar, where Blanche is a member, and the District of Columbia bar, where Woodward is a member, noting “disciplinary proceedings are currently ongoing” against them over ethics complaints already filed.
Here is where things stand today, so you have the full picture. The fund was never actually paid out. After bipartisan blowback in Congress, a separate federal judge in Virginia blocked it, and the administration said it was walking away from it. This order goes further and stops the parties from ever using their private deal as a “settlement” blessed by a court. One piece of the deal, the promise shielding Trump and his family from future audits, is the piece the administration has refused to put in writing that it will drop.
She ended with John Adams: “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” The facts here are stubborn. A president sued the agencies he runs. His former personal lawyers, now running the Justice Department, signed the other side of the deal. They walked away from winning defenses their own colleagues had written down. They tried to lock in $1.776 billion of public money and permanent immunity for the president and his family, and then told Congress “there is no judge” who would ever look.
There was a judge. She looked. She found a case “resolved” before any real fight happened, a lawsuit that “was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute,” and she named it for what it was, a private giveaway laundered through a federal court.
The Justice Department works for you. Its job is to see “that the laws of the United States… be faithfully executed.” Its leaders treated your Treasury like a personal account, your courts like a rubber stamp, and you like someone who would never read the fine print. One judge read every page and said so out loud.
So read this again, and remember the one line to carry to anyone. A president sued himself and tried to mail you the bill. Say it at dinner tonight. Send this to the person who swears both parties are the same and none of it touches your life. This reached for your Treasury, your courts, and the promise that the law lands the same on all of us.
You pay what you owe. You now have proof, in fifty-six pages, that someone at the top decided he never would. Do not let this become normal. Talk about it. Share it. Blanche faces the Senate this week for the job of Attorney General on a permanent basis. Ask the people who represent you where they stand, and make them answer before the next gavel falls.
Mitch Jackson, Esq.
We already knew! Grifter family strikes again trying to get away with murder! Speaking of how many US citizens have been killed by Trump’s ICE?
Thank you Mitch for doing all of the reading and delivering a spot on summary.