President Donald Trump speaks from the first tee box prior to the Presidents Cup golf tournament final round singles matches between the USA and International teams at Medinah Country Club, Sunday, Sept. 27, 2026, in Medinah, Ill. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum).
When a federal judge wouldn’t halt her sanctions order against President Donald Trump and his attorneys for bringing a “collusive” IRS lawsuit with “no viable basis in law or fact,” she made a point to call out an attempt to “mischaracterize” her punishment. Now that the stay denial is on appeal, the president’s lawyers and the DOJ are combining forces.
In a short response at the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday, Trump’s private attorneys with the firm DLA Piper LLP expressed agreement with the Trump DOJ’s filing from four days earlier, demanding an “immediate stay” of U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ “unprecedented, unconstitutional sanctions.”
As recently as two weeks ago, Williams rejected “each argument” for staying the “imposition of three sanctions” as “unpersuasive,” defending a bar referral and the attorneys’ fees she allowed 35 former federal judges and ex-IRS and Treasury officials to seek from Trump for the trouble of opposing the lawsuit as amici curiae, or friends of the court.
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Williams, a Barack Obama appointee who once issued an order for Florida to shut down “Alligator Alcatraz” only to be reversed by the 11th Circuit, stood by her “detailed findings” that the president’s attorneys filed a “collusive” lawsuit to “manipulate the judicial process” — and provide a veneer of legitimacy to a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization” fund and “settlement” immunizing the Trump family and the president from backward-looking tax probes.
On Monday, Trump’s attorneys claimed that Williams had issued a “categorical rule” against a sitting chief executive suing the government he heads when she said he “could have” filed the same lawsuit “while a private citizen.”
That made “clear that the purported defect turned not on the claims asserted, but on President Trump’s status while asserting them,” the response claimed.
In her order, Williams issued a straightforward rejection of the Trump team’s framing of her ruling.
“The Movants mischaracterize the Sanctions Order as establishing a brightline rule ‘that a President who sues the Executive agency is necessarily suing himself,'” the judge said. “This is incorrect; the Sanctions Order established no such categorical rule. On the contrary, the Sanctions Order acknowledged that Lead Plaintiff did have a right to sue and could have done so, without issue, during the lawfully specified time and while a private citizen.”
There, the judge referred to the statute of limitations.
And in her July sanctions order, Williams said it “is true that President Trump had a legal right to bring a suit for the unlawful disclosure” of his tax returns, but he simply didn’t do so in time.
“Notably, had President Trump (and his then-lawyers Alina Habba and Todd Blanche) brought this lawsuit in a timely fashion while he was a private citizen, this litigation understandably might have been resolved in a 109-day time span,” the judge said. “But that is not what happened. 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.”
“These officials then negotiated on behalf of the United States, with his current lawyers, including his former White House Counsel to reach a ‘settlement,'” the judge recounted the order of events, adding that it was “risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between” Trump the individual and his administration’s IRS.
The DOJ has argued that Williams’ “wrong” and “illogical” order threatens to unleash an “onslaught of sanctions motions and orders against every claim, lawyer, party, or settlement that any interloper or district judge personally dislikes—precedent, logic, jurisdiction, the Constitution, and the facts all be damned.”
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