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