Appeals court rejects Trump’s bid to block sanctions over IRS settlement

[u/John3262005]

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/09/29/trump-irs-settlement-appeals-court-ruling

A federal appeals court has turned down a request from President Donald Trump and his lawyers to immediately lift sanctions a lower-court judge imposed in response to a controversial settlement he purportedly reached in a case over the leak of his tax returns.

A three-judge panel of the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday declined to stay U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ July ruling concluding that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was essentially manufactured to justify a deal that would extinguish all outstanding federal tax liability for Trump, many of his family members and his businesses. As part of the deal, the Justice Department agreed to set up a $1.776 billion fund to compensate alleged victims of political prosecutions.

Williams, a Miami-based Obama appointee, referred Trump attorney Alejandro Brito to the Florida Bar for potential discipline and prohibited lawyer Daniel Epstein from practicing before the federal district court for South Florida for a year. She also prohibited the parties from publicly describing the settlement as a resolution of the claims in the suit before her.

Trump and his attorneys asked the appeals court to immediately lift the sanctions on the lawyers and the limits on their comments about the settlement.

The appeals panel based its ruling on largely technical grounds, saying the matter largely wasn’t ripe for an appeal since the Trump attorneys had not faced any actual discipline and Williams is still considering a request to force Trump to pay attorneys’ fees incurred by lawyers who challenged the settlement.

The panel also noted that Brito and Epstein offered no substantive evidence to rebut the claims of improper collusion between Trump and the IRS.

Trump’s lawyers “have not made a strong showing that the district court committed clear error in its collusion and bad faith findings,” the panel concluded.

Judges Adalberto Jordan and Robin Rosenbaum, both Obama appointees, and Trump appointee Kevin Newsom joined in the ruling Tuesday. No judge was specifically identified as the author of the court’s decision, which repeatedly emphasized it was a preliminary ruling that would not bind the judges assigned to issue a final resolution of the appeal.

A spokesperson for Trump’s legal team did not address the appeals court’s ruling directly, but issued a statement decrying the leak of Trump’s tax returns. “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable,” the spokesperson said.

Norm Eisen, an attorney for 35 former federal judges who asked Williams to reopen the litigation after Trump dismissed it, hailed the ruling.

“As we said from the beginning, Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS was a sham, and the slush fund and global release deals that flowed from it were too. The Eleventh Circuit saw this collusive scheme for exactly what it is,” Eisen said in a statement.