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Yesterday in the Southern District of Florida Donald J. Trump, in his personal capacity, filed a lawsuit for $10 billion in damages related to the leak of his tax returns. The defendants? The Internal Revenue Service and the United States Department of the Treasury. I am not familiar enough with the relevant statutes to venture whether this claim is viable. Assuming it is, I am highly skeptical Trump and his co-plaintiffs could demonstrate $10 billion in actual damages (which is what the cited statutes allow them to recover plus costs and attorney fees). I also read both statutes as having a two year statute of limitations and the events giving rise to the liability occurred in 2019/2020 so it is not clear to me that the suit is viable on that basis.
The above may all be academic. My understanding of the relevant federal procedure is that judges are not going to raise issues like the statute of limitations or factual issues with alleged damages on their own initiative. Our system assumes the parties are adversarial, so the defendants would file a motion to dismiss citing the statute of limitations or contest any damage calculations they thought were incorrect. Of course, in this case, the plaintiff is also the boss of the defendant. With plenary power to fire them. Can Trump, as president, just order Scott Bessent (currently both the Secretary of the Treasury and Commissioner of the IRS) to settle the suit for the full amount? And fire him if he refuses? What is the precedent on presidents suing the government while they're president? Normally when one side of a lawsuit is not interested in pressing its case other entities that have a shared interest can intervene to do so, but it's not clear to me who is in that position here.
I guess (random layman thoughts) maybe there's an argument that federal courts don't have jurisdiction to hear this because the parties aren't actually in controversy as required by Article 3, since it's Trump suing himself? Just spitballing. Is there any legal mechanism, short of impeachment, to prevent Trump from gifting himself the full contents of the United States Treasury via lawsuit settlements?
This here is more American retardation on display for the rest of the world to see. Here in the UK we have the English rules on costs, meaning that the losing side in a dispute has to pay the reasonable legal costs of the winning side, where reasonable strongly depends on the size of the dispute. If you're going to file a $10bn claim a proportionate costs budget itself ends up in the nine figures range, meaning you need to put your money where your mouth is on the dispute being one where you're willing to take it to trial and win a substantial proportion of the amount claimed.
If you're just using lawfare to harass others based on flimsy claims worth nowhere near the claimed amount then you get hit with an early Part 36 offer forcing you to either publicly admit that your claim doesn't have anywhere near the amount of value you're saying and then withdraw the claim, or alternatively if you're stubborn I hope you like that public nine figure costs bill for the other side coming your way and costing you orders of magnitude more than the money you won at trial.
A proper costs regime keeps people honest, which is something sorely lacking in the American legal world right now.
Both Europeans and Americans who favor tort reform like to point this out all the time, but I honestly don't think it would have too much of an effect on the current system. Yes, defending litigation is expensive. But so is suing people. You have a frivolous lawsuit you want to file? Good luck finding an attorney to take it on contingency. Even if the attorney can minimize the amount of time spent on the case and only file necessary motions, you're going to need at least one deposition and at least one expert if you expect to win through anything other than early settlement (which is usually at enough of a discount that most plaintiff's attorneys aren't interested), you're already looking at close to ten grand just in costs. Since the attorney has to recoup the costs from somewhere, and doesn't like to work on cases and not get paid, the standard 1/3 contingency isn't going to apply unless the lawyer is reasonably confident that the case will settle for more than it costs to pursue. That means that if you want to file a questionable suit you'd better be prepared to pay your attorney by the hour and front the costs of all the expenses.
When people talk about frivolous lawsuits, they're often talking about lawsuits where they didn't like how much the plaintiff was awarded, like the McDonald's coffee suit. But these aren't frivolous by definition; the plaintiff won, so there wouldn't be any compensation for attorney's fees in any event. Cases like these would actually be more expensive for the defendants, as the plaintiffs could then go to the court with their hours and rates and bills from all the experts and depositions and such and tacked on a few tens of thousands to the verdict that wouldn't go away on appeal.
Further complicating this is that most normal people who get sued will be sued in situations where either auto or homeowner's liability insurance will cover the costs of both the attorney and the settlement, so they aren't directly impacted by any reforms. The same is true of most businesses; if you slip and fall in the Wal-Mart parking lot, the settlement isn't coming out of the corporate checking account except to the extent that it might have an effect on their premiums. The primary beneficiaries of such a system are insurance companies, who absolutely despise having to pay settlements and legal fees. But general liability insurance is already cheap enough that most companies wouldn't see their premiums appreciably lowered by that kind of reform (medical malpractice is the exception, though plaintiff-side claims are expensive enough that there's very little frivolity to be found here). The tradeoff is that normal people will find it even harder to get compensation than it already is, as it just raises the already high bar for how much a case needs to be worth for an attorney to take it. And I say all this as someone who does civil defense work.
The only instance I see where the process can seriously be abused is when wealthy people like Trump use their ability to pay to bully normal people into settling rather than fighting. But this doesn't happen very often, and when it does happen it's usually in a few select areas that can be addressed through more targeted legislation, like anti-SLAPP statutes. I wouldn't even be opposed to a wider procedural change that required you to show evidence that a case wasn't frivolous, or gave defendants a mechanism to require such a showing, and to award attorney's fees if evidence is lacking. But it's probably better to leave this for specific situations, since it most cases it would simply be a waste of time.
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That's completely wrong, isn't it? In the UK, the loser pays the costs of the winner. It's very very rare to pay the costs of the winner unless their behaviour is incredibly egregious.
Sry, my bad, I got it the wrong way around. Rest of my comment only makes sense if you take it to mean the right way around. Busy day...
Winning side paying the costs of the losing side would be a recipe for disaster as it would allow people to harass others via lawfare for free, as opposed to having to pay their own legal costs as they have to do right now in the US at least.
Of course, I was just surprised and wanted to check in case I was totally misinformed.
Incidentally, there are some cases where the loser doesn't have to pay costs, the most egregious of which is that if you are supported by public aid (mostly immigrants being supported by legal charities) you're theoretically poor and you don't have to pay even if a) you cause the other party to pay millions in damages or costs and b) your sponsors are rolling.
The UK's loser-pays-winner paradigm isn't perfect. My family were put off pursuing a perfectly-winnable claim because we had a 95% chance of winning but we would bankrupt ourselves trying to pay for the other side's top-tier legal team on the 5% chance we lost.
Losers pays without strict boundaries can of course be very bad too if the one paying the bill has deep pockets. It’s a recipe for the winning side to run of their lawyer tab for frivolous things. JPMorgan was the victim in a fraud of a start-up they bought but ended up having to pay the other sides legal bills as they had become an employee.
https://www.pymnts.com/legal/2025/jpmorgan-fights-paying-unconscionable-legal-fees-for-frank-founder/
It can be bad for 50-50 cases. Like think of Chevron and Exxon suing each other. The winning side could end up working out a deal where they inflate their bills in the win in exchange for lightly billing on other work etc.
The JPMorgan case is probably the extreme of extremes.
And of course long shot cases like the Tobacco lawsuits would have been tough to bring. Especially if you required deposits to bring a case if the one suing is judgement proof because they are a poor smoker dying.
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Fair enough, but that's why you have things like After The Event (ATE) insurance. If you have a perfectly winnable claim it shouldn't be that hard to get ATE insurance covering you if you lose in return for them taking like 10% of your winnings if you win. Plus even if you lose the judge retains discretion to not award costs or award reduced costs if it's not just and equitable to force you to pay (as often happens for many immigration cases when the claimant loses their claim for Judicial Review because they didn't like their visa getting denied etc. but the judge didn't agree with them).
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You only are noticing this because it's Trump. Fed's sue the Federal Government, and the Federal Government just gives them handouts in the form of settlements all the time. Look up what ultimately happened with Peter Strzok. It's just another quasi-legal form of corruption, and making sure the made men of the deep state stay made.
People are going to be outraged that Trump is suing ostensibly his own government (by pretending not to know things) over a legitimate grievance, and then go back to ignoring the golden parachutes used up deep state cronies keep getting once the public (as much of the public that cared) has moved on from their crimes.
Having a functional long term memory, I actually recall what a singular, unprecedented, and highly illegal event it was having some "rogue" IRS agent leak Trump's tax returns. Dude who did it is currently in prison, and also, people other than Trump have sued. Some sued BAH who was dude's employer, some sued the IRS directly.
I feel like the situations are pretty different. Strzok was, as literally as possible, not-a-Fed when he sued the government. Part of his suit was alleging wrongful termination. He also was not the boss of the Attorney General, with authority to fire him if he didn't like the settlement terms. I am open to the possibility Trump has a viable claim but I am highly skeptical about how this process will play out, given he controls both sides of the litigation.
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((It's not clear that the sticker-price is something being seriously argued, rather than an opening-bid. It's a... very aggressive argument, and being independent from actual damages that would normally make it more desirable probably makes it less interesting as a final action for Trump, who definitely puts "I was right" as a high value.))
Courts do independently bring in external lawyers to support a legal brief, though the actual legal (and financial!) authorization to do so is very unclear. I'd expect that at a minimum.
Courts have an independent duty to consider standing, and defendants (and plaintiffs) can't wave that, even if they wanted. Only would clearly help with overtly pretextual lawsuits, though, which isn't really the case, here. There's an adversity doctrine argument against collusive lawsuits, but it's an incredible reach to apply it here.
(Defendants can waive statute of limitations concerns in some cases)
Settlements have to be evaluated by the courts to be 'real' settlements. That's historically been held more in theory than in practice, given the cy pres abuse back in the Obama era, but it could and likely would be brought here. On the gripping hand, you don't need a 'real' settlement to have a court case go away, or a lot of money to change hands.
In theory, anyone with an IRS balance is being harmed by a massive giveaway, but courts have universally rejected taxpayer standing, and with good reason. The House, with the power of the purse, does have legislative standing in a lot of cases and might have it in face of a large giveaway -- but individual legislators might not, and there's a lot of messiness about how they could argue about the facts. And, ultimately, there's a 'you and who's army' problem.
On the gripping hand, the courts might well just move so slowly that someone else is the President by the time it gets anywhere.
Sometimes I feel like I might be the only person on the planet who slogged through The Art of the Deal. This has been Trump's negotiating MO for decades at this point - the only real difference is that this time it's in a court house and not a conference room.
The door-in-the-face negotiation tactic is maybe the oldest in the book, and Trump seems to think it’s the most brilliant thing ever. Perhaps he’s right, judging by how many people still don’t seem to notice when he’s using it.
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