President Donald Trump listens during a cabinet meeting, Friday, July 31, 2026, at Camp David, the presidential retreat, near Thurmont, Md. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
"I'm sort of suing myself," Donald Trump said openly in the months before he sued the IRS for $10 billion. Now, unless his private lawyers succeed in overturning a judge's sanctions order on appeal, the president may well have to pay the legal fees of former judges and ex-IRS officials who opposed the case in a way the DOJ never did.
Trump filed an expedited motion on Friday asking U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams to halt her sanctions order and "related proceedings" until the president's "Anti-Weaponization Fund"-focused appeal runs its course at the 11th Circuit.
Weeks ago, Williams found the president's attorneys filed a "non-adversarial, collusive" lawsuit to "manipulate the judicial process" and improperly force the IRS into a $1.776 billion "settlement" that "had no viable basis in law or fact." The judge then imposed "non-monetary" sanctions against Trump's attorneys, Alejandro Brito and Daniel Epstein, for their involvement.
In Brito's case, it meant a referral to the Florida Bar; for Epstein, a former White House lawyer, it meant he won't be granted pro hac vice permission to appear in the Southern District of Florida for "one year or until further order of this Court."
Also at stake, however, are monetary sanctions, and the "appropriate" amount of "reimbursement" that groups of amici curiae may receive.
The judge had already appointed three amici curiae, or friends of the court, to argue whether she had subject-matter jurisdiction over the case, given the DOJ's completely "silent" approach on her docket. But 35 former federal judges and a coalition of former IRS and Treasury Department officials separately submitted briefs to assist Williams in an eventual ruling.
When the judge did rule, she noted that these amici "may file […] a memorandum regarding any appropriate reimbursement." The amici did just that, with the former judges seeking $4,610.83 and ex-IRS officials asking for $39,000 for "work performed by counsel from Democracy Forward Foundation."
According to the listed counsel for Trump's attorneys, Brito and Epstein, as well as for Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization, Williams' injunction "forbidding the President, private Plaintiffs, federal agencies, and sweeping categories of associated persons from 'referring to' the Settlement Agreement or invoking it in any future judicial, administrative, regulatory, arbitral, or other official proceeding" must be overruled — and so must the sanctions that flowed from it.
"[T]he wrongful invitation to seek fees, which the Court entered pursuant to its inherent authority, is entirely derivative of the underlying sanctions ruling," DLA Piper attorney Christopher G. Oprison argued Friday. "If the Sanctions Order is reversed on appeal—as Movants submit it will be—the fee proceedings will be moot."
Because the amici are non-parties to the case, the filing asserted, 11th Circuit precedent "foreclose[s]" Williams from forcing Trump to pony up attorneys' fees.
"[R]ecasting the award as a sanction does not help," the filing said, seeking a stay pending appeal because the judge "erred."
A spokesman from Trump's legal team previously said the IRS "wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee," Charles Littlejohn, to "leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people," the statement said.
In her order, however, Williams noted Trump "had a legal right to bring a suit for the unlawful disclosure" of his tax returns, but he didn't sue in a "timely fashion."
"Instead, President Trump did not pursue his claims until he once again occupied the White House and had appointed his former lawyer, and the former lawyer of persons who are putative beneficiaries of the 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' to prominent positions in the DOJ," the judge said, in part referring to Todd Blanche, whose nomination for attorney general stalled this week.