President Donald Trump’s string of courtroom defeats over his financial schemes is only the opening wave, and more are on the way, conservative former federal appeals court Judge J. Michael Luttig warned in remarks to The Guardian published Sunday morning.
Luttig, a George H.W. Bush appointee who spent 15 years on the federal appeals bench, cast this year’s rulings against Trump as one story.
“The courts have recently begun to strike down Trump’s countless schemes of blatant and shameless venality and corruption in the forms of self-enrichment, bribery, and extortion,” Luttig said.
He grouped those rulings with the courts’ rejection of Trump’s tariffs and his birthright citizenship order, the Guardian reported.
The most striking case grew out of Trump’s own tax fight. After he sued the IRS for $10 billion over his leaked returns, administration lawyers agreed to a settlement that would have steered $1.8 billion to people who said they had been persecuted for political reasons under the Biden administration.
U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams found the arrangement “premised on deception” and concluded Trump’s side had brought the suit “in bad faith.” The administration abandoned the fund in June. Luttig was part of a group of 35 former judges that intervened in the case in May.
Weeks before the midterms, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Rochon in Manhattan cut off taxpayer funding for a pro-Trump ad blitz. Homeland Security had spent $20 million on it, contracting records show. Three of the ads, she found, were “purely partisan,” including a spot pitching “$5,000 to Americans.”
Still unresolved is a challenge, joined by San Francisco’s city attorney, to Trump Media’s Truth API, which sells a head start on the president’s posts for up to $100,000 a month.
“That is the through-line of these three cases and the numerous other cases to come,” Luttig said.
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