President Donald Trump, right, walks at the North Portico of the White House, Saturday, July 11, 2026, in Washington (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein).
Attorneys for President Donald Trump have asked a federal appeals court to immediately step in and halt a judge’s scathing sanctions order, after the jurist declined to issue a stay.
“This appeal arises from the district court’s extraordinary abuse of its sanctions power,” Trump’s brief said Wednesday, repeating that a “stay would harm no one” in the interim.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams last week said there was no “good cause” to halt a ruling that referred Trump attorney Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar and granted monetary “reimbursement” for amici curiae — or friends of the court — she allowed to enter the IRS lawsuit.
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As Law&Crime has reported, those amici included 35 former federal judges, as well as ex-IRS and Treasury officials, who advanced arguments that the Trump DOJ did not make before Trump the individual moved to voluntarily dismiss the action. The judge saw the sudden dismissal as a way for Trump to “manipulate the judicial process” and improperly force the IRS into a $1.776 billion “settlement” with “no viable basis in law or fact,” while opening the door for Trump supporters to seek payouts from a so-called “anti-Weaponization Fund.”
The judge, a Barack Obama appointee, responded in mid-July by issuing serious sanctions. She also barred reference to the “settlement” she deemed “non-adversarial” and “collusive.”
According to Trump’s lawyers, Williams made those findings without “proof of collusion and bad faith” — all while slapping a “sweeping, unconstitutional, and unlawful gag order” on the president himself.
“The injunction categorically forbids Movants from even ‘referring to’ the Settlement Agreement, and separately bars any use of its provisions in official proceedings,” the brief said. “That gag order wrongly silences the sitting President, the Government, private parties, and counsel on a matter of obvious public concern at a politically consequential moment — and denies the public the right to hear their views.”
The brief said the sanctions order “flowed from a single predicate legal error: that presidential supervision under Article II supposedly eliminated Article III adversity.”
“That is wrong,” the president’s appellate lawyers said, urging the 11th Circuit not to let the “gag order and career-altering punishment of the Attorneys” stand.
“The court wrongly imposed a punishment that no party requested through a sanctions proceeding that was never lawfully commenced. The Attorneys received no notice their professional standing and ability to practice were at stake,” the brief continued. “The court failed to identify for Plaintiffs or their Attorneys much of the conduct it erroneously considered contemptuous. No individualized finding established that the Plaintiffs or their Attorneys knowingly made a false statement or acted in bad faith, neither of which actually took place.”
The post Trump lawyers seek ‘immediate’ halt to judge’s ‘gag order’ that ‘wrongly silences the sitting President’ without any ‘proof of collusion’ first appeared on Law & Crime.
