Main: The Miami-Dade College parking lot, the area where Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is proposing to establish President Donald Trump’s presidential library, is seen next to the Freedom Tower, left, on Sept. 23, 2025, in Miami (AP Photo/Marta Lavandier, File). Right inset: President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as he walks from Air Force One at Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, N.J., Friday, July 31, 2026, from Camp David, the presidential retreat (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin).
A federal judge in South Florida dashed the hopes of plaintiffs seeking “limited discovery” into the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library Foundation, Inc., issuing a stay until he resolves the DOJ’s presidential “immunity” and standing questions “which, if successful, would dispose of the entire case.”
The paperless order from U.S. District Judge Rodolfo Armando Ruiz II on Friday said that President Donald Trump and state defendants, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, established “good cause” to stay discovery pending a ruling on their motion to throw out the lawsuit over the would-be “library.”
Ruiz, a Trump appointee, found that “Presidential and Eleventh Amendment immunity defenses” should be resolved before historian and psychology professor Marvin Dunn can make any headway in discovery, as there may be no need.
Love true crime? Sign up for our newsletter, The Law&Crime Docket, to get the latest real-life crime stories delivered right to your inbox.
“Defendants advance immunity defenses, and Plaintiffs’ bases for standing are clearly contested in Defendants’ Motions to Dismiss,” the judge observed.
Dunn’s Overtown Farms — a nonprofit urban farm and market in Miami doing business as Sistrunk Seeds Inc. that the professor co-founded — filed suit in May with student Carmen Salcedo, pointing out that the president said the “library” to be built on the Miami-Dade College parking lot (MDC parcel) at issue is “most likely going to be a hotel[.]” Individual plaintiffs who claimed they can see the “MDC parcel” from where they live also joined the lawsuit.
The lawsuit alleges that Florida Republicans’ gift of 2.63 acres with “waterfront views” — and worth roughly $300 million — to the Trump Library Foundation is an unconstitutional emolument.
Noting Eric Trump is one of three named trustees of the Trump Library Foundation, the plaintiffs argued that the Constitution is clear — that Trump and all other presidents are “prohibit[ed] […] from receiving emoluments directly or constructively, through persons such as his immediate family members or corporate entities that he controls formally or informally.”
In response, the DOJ said that by the standards advanced in the plaintiffs’ “ambitiously novel” and “illogical” lawsuit, presidents from George Washington to Joe Biden violated the Constitution.
Former Presidents Barack Obama and Biden owned “U.S. Treasury notes and bills during their tenure” and accrued interest “from the United States” while in office, the government said.
Nonetheless, the plaintiffs insisted that the DOJ clampdown on discovery through immunity defenses was “self-serving,” a sign of “panic,” and ultimately “much ado about nothing.”
The judge did not agree.
“[A]t this juncture, case-dispositive challenges persist that may prove to be successful,” Ruiz said.
The post Lawsuit over Trump ‘library’ teeters on the brink as judge shuts down discovery to hear DOJ defenses that may ‘dispose of the entire case’ first appeared on Law & Crime.
