Simply Indefensible

Trump's $1.8 billion slush fund is so bad, there's no telling where the money is going.

In 2024, the Supreme Court rejected a bankruptcy order in the bankruptcy case filed by Purdue Pharma, the makers of OxyContin, that sought to shield the individual majority owners of the company, members of the Sackler family, from future lawsuits after they had raided the company’s assets of $11 billion dollars (representing 75% of the company’s assets). The Court rejected the bankruptcy order as being beyond the power of the courts, but what it was really saying was the settlement with just some parties, over the objection of some of the parties to the action, and to the exclusion of future claims, reflected a sort of collusive use of the power of the courts to protect the Sacklers from responsibility for their actions.

Is the settlement of President Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service this same sort of collusive lawsuit and settlement?

Donald Trump has a long history of filing cases as a means of cowing his opponents into submission, regardless of the merits of the underlying claims. Indeed, the president is no stranger to the courts. He has sued and been sued countless times.

Sometimes those cases fail, as in his massive lawsuit against Hillary Clinton that an appeals court confirmed was frivolous, upholding a penalty of $1 million that the president and his lawyer in the case, Alina Habba, had to pay for Clinton’s legal fees in defending against the action. Similarly, his defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for publishing what the paper claimed was a note from the president to Jeffrey Epstein was recently dismissed.

But they also sometimes succeed regardless of merit, like when he sued CBS for alleged selective editing of an interview of Kamala Harris during the 2024 election. CBS settled the case in what was likely a transparent effort to get approval by the Trump Administration for a merger application before it.

People file lawsuits all the time. That is generally a good thing. We want disputes resolved in the courts through the adversarial system, before an impartial adjudicator—an independent judge or jury—rather than in the streets through violence.

At the same time, essential to the adversarial process is that the parties must actually be adversaries. We don’t believe the courts should be a forum for made-up cases carried out by litigants who are abusing the legal system for personal gain in a collusive way. An individual files a fraudulent personal injury claim and splits the insurance proceeds with the defendant. A multi-national corporation conspires with the lawyers purporting to represent the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit to resolve the claims against the company in a way favorable to that company and which enriches the lawyers, all the while ensuring that claims by any other potential plaintiffs are foreclosed by the settlement.

Is what the president has done here much different from these types of collusive lawsuits?

Read my piece in MS Now on the slush-fund settlement here.