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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.
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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