President Donald Trump’s ill-fated $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund suffered yet another major blow on Monday, with a federal judge delivering a brutal review of the process that led to it.
It’s part of a growing trend of judges saying rather bluntly that Trump and his Justice Department aren’t operating in good faith — and even that they’re misusing the legal process for Trump’s personal and political benefit.
The most recent is US District Judge Kathleen Williams, a Barack Obama nominee whose 56-page opinion is routinely brutal toward Trump and his DOJ’s conduct in the case that produced the now-defunct settlement.
Williams said the settlement — which included the fund that could have given money to violent January 6 defendants and also purported to give Trump amnesty from past tax issues — resulted from a lawsuit that was essentially a pretext.
She said Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS over the illegal leaking of his tax returns was merely meant to “provide some legitimacy” to what the administration already wanted to do with the settlement.
“This lawsuit was not brought to vindicate rights; it was brought to manipulate the judicial process to pursue benefits unavailable in litigation because the Parties were not adverse,” Williams said.
(Indeed, the main problem with Trump’s lawsuit was that the two sides of it — the personal lawyers working for Trump and the Justice Department he runs — weren’t sufficiently adversarial, and thus nobody really seemed to be fighting against what Trump wanted.)
The judge then went even further. She referred one of the private attorneys working for Trump to the Florida Bar for possible disciplinary action. She blocked another from court appearances in the Southern District of Florida for a year. And she even ordered that her opinion be included in the reviews of preexisting professional ethics complaints against acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward.
Blanche is currently facing confirmation hearings after Trump officially nominated him for AG.
A judge had similarly harsh rhetoric for the administration last week.
US District Judge William M. Ray II, a Trump nominee, invalidated a grand jury subpoena that sought personal information about scores of election workers in Fulton County, Georgia. The subpoena was part of an effort to scrutinize the 2020 election results that Trump has spent years claiming, without evidence, were rigged.
Ray, like Williams, suggested the proceedings were something of a ruse. He said the statutes of limitations had passed for charging any election workers even if crimes were found, thus rendering the subpoena an “arbitrary fishing expedition.”
He said the relative ease with which prosecutors can obtain subpoenas from grand juries “does not give DOJ the right to use the grand jury to do whatever the DOJ wants.”
“Everyone, whether you support the president or you do not, or whether you believe the 2020 election was fair or believe that it was not, should be concerned about the DOJ’s ability to utilize the power of the grand jury to appropriate your private information without a legitimate purpose,” Ray wrote.
In late June, another Republican-appointed judge blocked subpoenas against Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other Democrats.
Chief Judge Patrick Schiltz, like the other judges, suggested the true motives were political — that the Justice Department was using the subpoenas to apply pressure, in this case related to the recent effort to crack down on undocumented immigrants in Minnesota.
Schiltz wrote that “the dominant purpose” of the subpoenas was to “coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil immigration law and to harass and retaliate against them for failing to do so.”
And another federal judge said back in March, while rejecting subpoenas during an investigation into then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, that the subpoenas had been intended to “harass and pressure” Powell into doing as Trump wanted and lowering interest rates.
These aren’t the first legal setbacks the Trump administration has faced — not by a long shot. Nor are they the first times that Trump and his side have faced harsh language.
But it’s notable that there’s a growing number of judges suggesting Trump’s administration is attempting to use the courts improperly — and how directly they say it.
Trump’s second term has featured a veritable assault of legally questionable actions that, at times, seem intended to challenge the courts to stop them.
On the surface, that throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks strategy might not seem like a bad idea. But it risks the courts as a whole coming to believe that the administration simply isn’t a good-faith operator and isn’t even trying be a good steward of the law.
Judges seem to be getting more comfortable with reaching such conclusions.
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