AP News53%
Judge says Trump IRS lawsuit was filed for ‘improper purpose,’ refers lawyer for possible discipline 44%
By ERIC TUCKER40% ALANNA DURKIN RICHER46%
7/13/2026, 3:59:59 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 17 faulty reasoning types, including Biased Writer Voice, Unattributed Quote, and Self-Serving Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 53.6% saturation with 346 hits. Analysis detected 1,246 faulty-reasoning hits from 645 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 47% and a BS Rank of 44% (11,891 of 20,882 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 56.90% of the article peer group.
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over his leaked tax returns was filed for an “improper purpose,” a judge said Monday as she referred one of his attorneys for potential disciplinary action and characterized the $10 billion complaint as an exercise in self-dealing.
U.S.
District Judge Kathleen Williams accused Trump and his lawyers in a scathing ruling of having manipulated the court system when he sued a federal agency under his control, bypassing a requirement that parties in a lawsuit must have adverse interests.
The lawsuit ended in a settlement that granted the president immunity from tax audits and established a $1.776 billion fund to compensate Trump allies who believe they’ve been unjustly persecuted.
“Whether Executive Branch actors can privately agree to give themselves and their former clients blanket immunities and billions of dollars in tax monies for legally undefined grievances was never an issue advanced to this Court,” said Williams, an appointee of President Barack Obama.
“The question is whether the Parties could do so by claiming to be adverse and engaging the legitimacy of a court proceeding.
The answer is a resounding ‘no.’”
The $10 billion suit against the IRS and Treasury Department in January accused the agencies of a failure to prevent a leak of the president’s tax information to news outlets between 2018 and 2020.
In May, however, the administration announced that it was settling the case and creating a fund to compensate people who believe they’ve been mistreated by the criminal justice system.
The fund was quickly shelved amid bipartisan backlash, though the Trump administration has said it intends to proceed with a separate element of the deal affording Trump and family members protection from tax audits.
From the start, the judge had appeared skeptical of the complaint and assigned a group of attorneys to determine whether there was a conflict in the case since, as sitting president, Trump was suing “entities whose decisions are subject to his direction.”
She made clear in her ruling that she was not satisfied by the lawyers’ answers.
“After a review of the record, and the Parties’ statements, the Court declines to adopt or accept the credulous exercise of divorcing President Trump’s current job title from an understanding of what happened here,” she wrote.
The ruling also raises the possibility of disciplinary actions
The judge referred Trump attorney Alejandro Brito, who filed the case, for possible disciplinary action before the state bar in Florida and said another lawyer, Daniel Epstein, will not be granted permission to file within the Southern District of Florida for up to a year.
A spokesman for the Trump legal team responded to a request seeking comment from Brito with a statement that blamed the IRS for allowing the president’s tax returns to be leaked.
The judge also ordered that her ruling be sent to the state bars in New York and the District of Columbia, where ethics complaints have been filed against Blanche and Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward.
Williams pointed to Blanche’s congressional testimony in early June in which he revealed that the fund was no longer moving forward.
Though nothing had been filed in court, Blanche appeared confident in his testimony that he “could speak for, and bind, both sides of this matter,” Williams said.
“Acting Attorney General Blanche’s apparent capacity to speak for both Plaintiffs and Defendants, sign a ‘settlement’ document on behalf of all Parties to this action, and then repudiate part of that agreement, demonstrates that there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout this case,” the judge wrote.
Blanche denied in a CNN interview last spring that he had developed the settlement terms, saying, “The president has outside counsel, and their counsel, the Department of Justice, not me.”
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77%flagged-word coverageKathleen Williams
382 attributed words93% of attributed speech99% writer coverage
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