RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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President Donald Trump on Friday appealed a federal judge's blistering order finding he filed a bad-faith $10 billion lawsuit in order to reach an advantageous settlement .
The notice of appeal in U.S. District Court in Miami was made public hours after Trump vented frustration that the $1.776 billion "lawfare" fund created as part of that settlement had been scrapped.
"They've agreed to not have a fund. But there are a lot of people that are very upset about it," Trump said at a Cabinet meeting at Camp David Friday afternoon.
The president also lamented that his nominee for U.S. attorney general, Todd Blanche , is in limbo in the Senate as a handful of Republican holdouts seek written confirmation that the controversial fund is indeed defunct. The senators say they have yet to receive that assurance, raising concern that the fund could be resurrected if Blanche is confirmed.
"The fund is dead, but, you know, I wish it weren't," Trump said at the Cabinet meeting before launching into complaints about supporters he said have been mistreated by federal law enforcement.
Trump, two of his adult sons and the Trump Organization, along with two of their attorneys, said in a joint filing Friday afternoon that they are appealing Judge Kathleen Williams' scathing order to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.
Williams had ruled July 13 that the lawsuit, ostensibly stemming from the leak of Trump's tax returns by an ex-IRS employee years earlier, was in fact brought to provide "judicial legitimacy for a 'settlement' that had no viable basis in law or fact."
After Friday's appeal notice was filed, a spokesman for Trump's legal team repeated a prior statement slamming the IRS leak and declaring, "President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable."
That settlement involved Trump and his co-plaintiffs dropping the suit in exchange for the Department of Justice creating a $1.776 billion fund that would be used to pay people who claimed to be victims of government lawfare.
Blanche, in prior Senate testimony, would not rule out that some of those funds could be given to people who were charged with assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Trump has pardoned virtually all Capitol rioters and frequently expresses sympathy for them.
In a Truth Social post Friday morning, he gave a full-throated defense of the fund, saying, "I will always feel that these victims of government abuse should be paid back for what they were forced to endure, their lives have been ruined!"
Some — including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, one of the Republicans standing in the way of Blanche's nomination — interpreted Trump 's post as referring to Jan. 6 participants and suggesting the fund was still alive.
The settlement also included a provision in which the DOJ agreed that the past federal tax returns of Trump, his family members and related entities are barred from IRS enforcement actions.
"The Court determines that Plaintiffs improperly employed this lawsuit to justify a particular award in this matter — access to taxpayer funds and exemption from audits and other investigations — which was accomplished by leveraging control over Defendants," Williams wrote in her July 13 order.
Williams imposed several non-monetary sanctions in the order, including referring one of Trump's attorneys, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary action.
She also barred another lawyer, Daniel Epstein, from being admitted to appear in the southern Florida federal court for one year.
And she prohibited Trump and the other parties in the lawsuit from referring to the "settlement agreement" as evidence that an actual settlement had been reached in the case.
Her order did not explicitly void the settlement itself, noting that the question of "whether a private agreement" between both sides is valid and enforceable "is not before this court."
A DOJ spokesperson responded to Williams' order at the time by insisting, "There was no collusion in this case, and the partisan judge who speculated otherwise has disregarded decades of precedent."
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