Judge Just Noticed The Obvious Problem With Trump Suing His Own IRS For $10 Billion

Legal Issues

from the no-adversary,-no-case dept

One of the more frustrating things about the case in which Donald Trump sued the IRS that he runs, demanding $10 billion over nothing, was that it seemed like it might just work, and there might be nothing that could be done to stop it. But at least one federal judge (luckily the one overseeing this “case”) is at least somewhat concerned about all this.

First, a quick recap, in part just to remind ourselves just how absolutely batshit crazy this situation is. Every major candidate for US President since Richard Nixon has voluntarily released his or her tax returns as a reasonable act of transparency to the public. Trump refused claiming (nonsensically) that he could not do so because he was being audited. He also promised to release them once the audit was complete. All of this was bullshit. Richard Nixon (who started this practice) was dealing with audit when he released his tax returns. Also, Trump refused to release returns from earlier that were outside of the returns supposedly being audited. Also, it’s been ten freaking years since he made that promise — and no tax returns have been released. Not willingly, anyway.

In 2019 and 2020 an IRS contractor, named Charles Littlejohn, leaked Trump’s tax returns (along with some other wealthy people) to the NY Times and Propublica, both of whom wrote stories about Trump’s ability to dodge paying taxes and to represent very different profit numbers to the IRS as compared to lenders. Littlejohn was arrested and is currently in prison, serving a five-year sentence for the leak.

Trump received effectively zero consequences for his sketchy tax return practices, or his false claims about being willing to release the returns to the public.

Instead, after he returned to the White House he decided to sue the IRS, which he runs, for an insane $10 billion. And when asked about it, he admitted that he was basically negotiating with himself over how much taxpayer money would be put into his own bank account. Earlier this month we noted a filing in the case about how Trump’s lawyers were asking for more time because they were trying to negotiate a “settlement” — with themselves. Can you just imagine how those meetings were going?

However, on Friday, the judge overseeing the case, Kathleen Williams, finally called out the emperor’s lack of clothes, noting that the core of the American judicial system was that you needed two adversarial parties with an actual controversy between them, and that didn’t appear to be the case here:

A key characteristic of the case or controversy requirement is the existence of adverseness, or “a dispute between parties who face each other in an adversary proceeding.” Aetna Life Ins. Co. of Hartford, Conn. v. Haworth, 300 U.S. 227, 242 (1937). “There must be an honest and actual antagonistic assertion of rights by one individual against another, which is neither feigned nor collusive.” Muransky, 979 F.3d at 981 (internal quotation marks and citations omitted). Typically, adverseness is found in a situation where one party is asserting its right and the other party is resisting. Nat’l Lab. Rels. Bd. v. Constellium Rolled Prods. Ravenswood, LLC, 43 F.4th 395, 400 (4th Cir. 2022) (internal quotations and citations omitted). Consequently, if there is no adverseness, there is no case or controversy.

In the instant case, Defendants have not yet filed any notices of appearance. Nonetheless, the Parties have advised the Court that they are engaging in discussions to resolve this matter. Moreover, although President Trump avers that he is bringing this lawsuit in his personal capacity, he is the sitting president and his named adversaries are entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.2 Indeed, President Trump’s own remarks about this matter acknowledge the unique dynamic of this litigation.3 Accordingly, it is unclear to this Court whether the Parties are sufficiently adverse to each other so as to satisfy Article III’s case or controversy requirement.

In other words, at least this judge is willing to say out loud what a total sham this whole setup is.

To deal with this, the judge has asked both “parties” to file briefs over this particular issue and set a hearing for the end of May to see what to do about all this. To call this a unique situation would be the understatement of the decade. One hopes that the courts recognize how blatantly corrupt this is, but we have to remember that if this actually continues, it would end up in front of the same court that decided when Donald Trump is president he’s effectively a king and can do whatever he wants (though, when a Democrat is president, they should have zero powers at all).

So while anyone with half a brain can recognize the absolute cynical corruption baked into this case, I have zero faith that this Supreme Court wouldn’t bless it — should the question of whether a Republican president can simply sue his own government and agree with himself to take money from the treasury ever actually reach the high court.

Filed Under: case or controversy, charles littlejohn, donald trump, irs, kathleen williams, tax returns