Lawfare Daily: Trump Sues Self, Settles

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It's an immunity deal. Immunity for any possible enforcement action that the federal government could bring at any time based upon anything that you or your family or your businesses or their businesses have done up to the date of the year so it's the LaFaire podcast. I'm Benjamin Wittis, editor-in-chief of LaFaire with LaFaire Senior Editor Eric Columbus.

“But also as you say at an equal protection component about the type of victim, that I think”

is probably a pill battle because the government, as I said, can is allowed to pick and choose but what types of victims it wants to harms the wants to remedy. We're talking presidents who sue themselves today. Donald Trump has done the impossible. He has settled litigation with himself on the basis of the creation of a slush fund to

a off political supporters along with a shocking immunity agreement by which the government

never seeks to sue him again.

Eric and LaFaire Senior Editor Anna Bauer have written a lengthy examination of this whole mess of issues we go through at all. I want to start with the backstory here. Donald Trump sues the IRS.

“Why did he sue the IRS and what if any merit did that suit have?”

The New York Times and Pro-Publica published stories about Donald Trump's tax returns that clearly came from a leak of some sort. This was back in the first term. The leak, I don't recall precisely when the stories were published but the leak as it turned out was from a document stolen by an IRS contractor named Charles Little John in 2019 and

2020.

Yes, the documents were pilfer during Trump's first term and he took this guy took documents

from a lot of people, a lot of big shots including Trump. He was prosecuted forward by the Biden administration and sentenced to five years in federal prison. So completely normal disposition of that case. Trump being Trump sued and he was in fact wrong.

He was a crime victim and so it was not entirely crazy that he would want some sort of remedy like the hedge fund Magnet Ken Griffin, also sued as it turned out he got only in apology as a remedy. Trump obviously got a whole lot more. There were a bunch of problems with Trump's case.

There was a statute of limitations, issue, the statute of limitations begins to run when you learn that your tax information was disclosed without authorization. He claims that didn't happen until January 29, 2024 when he got an IRS letter saying that Little John had been charged with disclosing his returns. But that had been known long before, or at the very least when Little John pleaded guilty

in 2023, one of Trump's own attorneys had addressed the court at that time. So it's pretty hard for Trump to claim that he was ignorant before then. There were some other issues and that Little John was a contractor.

So in a normal course of events, the government would have defended this case and the Ken

“Griffin example where Griffin got a deserved apology very much stands out.”

Trump got a whole lot more. So it's fair to say that leaving aside the legal merits of the case for a minute, you're not the IRS is supposed to protect people's tax returns. Leaks of tax returns are bad, although there's a fairly good argument that if you're president and you promised to release your tax returns and then renegade on the promise,

it may be a little bit less bad. And that said it's no less illegal. And he was in this instance a civil liberties victim and there's the sum righteousness to the idea that something inappropriate happened here, but he wouldn't win the suit. Is that a fair summary?

It's probably that he would probably not win the suit. Yeah. So in the suit, the damages that he'd be able to before be vastly smaller than what he received. All right.

So Trump finds himself in this quite enviable position of essentially suing himself, which is to say he's suing the federal government that he's now ahead of the unitary executive

of that federal government and the IRS ultimately reports to him.

Before we get to what happened, let's break down what his authorities are. He is both the plaintiff here and he is not quite the defendant, but he does direct the defendant. What are his powers? What does he have the authority to do? What doesn't he have the authority to do regarding directing the IRS to settle this case

“with him that it would lose on the basis of the $10 billion that he sought as damages?”

Well, if the kind of depends upon how one views presidential authority, you could, if you're a firm and believer in a unitary executive, you would say that the president has full authority to direct the IRS, the Department of Treasury, and the Department of Justice as their lawyers to do anything in litigation and even to settle a case on generous terms that he has filed against them.

There is a criminal statute that provides that it's a crime for certain people, including the Treasury Secretary and the President to order the termination, either the investigation, or the termination of an investigation of any tax audit into a taxpayer, of course, under the Supreme Court's Trump decision from 2024, Trump would not be able to be prosecuted for such an official act, and perhaps not even the Treasury Secretary could be, but there

are all sorts of constitutional reasons and policy reasons why we think that the president would not have the ability to do this, but that is by no means an uncontested view.

“Yeah, I think as a functional matter, the president does have the ability to do this because”

he has the authority under the Appointments clause to appoint the Treasury Secretary to fire the Treasury Secretary to appoint the Commissioner of the IRS to fire the Commissioner of the IRS to appoint the Attorney General to fire the Attorney General right, and the power to do that is functionally the power to direct a settlement, assuming you're willing to tolerate the political consequences for behaving that way.

Is that, do you think it's -- it's in functional terms more complicated than that? Well, then there is the issue of whether a court has jurisdiction in such a case, whether there is a case or controversy under article three if it's a elusive suit, and elusive

suits do happen from time to time, and they're not always evil, but if you're really

here that it may have a constitutional dimension beyond just kind of specific trouble for Trump,

“himself, and that's what the District Judge Williams in the Southern District of Florida”

was worried about, and she appointed team of outside lawyers as Amicus, a meaty jury to for herself, to assist her analyzing the jurisdictional question, and it was really an all-star casted, included Don Verily, former solicitor general, included John Gleason, former U.S. District Judge for the Eastern District of New York, who I believe, if I'm every service prosecutor, John Gotti, when he was a prosecutor, and they filed a brief, and it was interesting, it was kind

of nuanced, they stopped short of recommending outright dismissal of the case, given the absence

of a factual record, but they said, basically, there needs to be adversity between the

parties, before the court to have subject-better jurisdiction, or a federal court to be able to hear the case, and if one party controls the other, then that doesn't exist, and so they suggested that the court obtained more information about maybe trying to see whether the ongoing settlement negotiations were being conducted, arms length, whether the DOJ Lawyers were insulated in any way, and it's quite possible, it's quite likely, I should say, that

the answers to those questions are no, and there was nothing being done to make it seem

“anything other than a sham, and I think that maybe spurred the Trump people to yank the”

case, as soon as they could, and this thing before the judge could do anything about it. That's a great introduction, and you and Annabauer have written a kind of exhaustive, I would say, survey examination of many of the issues that arise from this settlement. That's first described the various components of it, because they're not all clearly linked to each other, though they are clearly coordinated and linked.

So, it seems to me there's three basic components of this settlement. One is that Trump drops the litigation, and the second is that instead of suing for

$10 billion to himself, the Justice Department sets up a 1.776, get it, $176 billion fund for payment

of victims of so-called weaponization by democratic but not Republican administrations, and number three, and this was not announced the same day, it was announced the following day. The Justice Department has committed that the IRS will not conduct any enforcement activity with respect to any pending matters vis-à-vis Trump's tax returns or those of his family

“or businesses, is that are there more components of the deal than that?”

That's right, the third one is actually incredibly, it's actually even broader than how

you described it, and that it covers anything that is any matters currently pending, or that could be pending before any part of the federal government. It's an immunity deal, it's an immunity deal, immunity for any, against any possible enforcement action that the federal government could bring at any time based upon anything that you or your family or your businesses or their businesses have done up to the date of the

settlement, and it covers criminal or civil matter. Well, it's a good question, I read it, I mean, it doesn't specify the language that it uses is just kind of tends to be kind of civil language, a criminal immunity is, in terms of the constitution, something that is bestowed by the president and by a pardon's or accept in the confines of resolving a specific criminal matter is not thought to be something that

Well, except that that's not right, because criminal immunity under the immunity statute

“happens all the time and is done by simply the government agreeing not to prosecute.”

Yes, but in a specific matter, I mean, the government doesn't agree, okay, I'm just not going to prosecute you for anything you've ever done, but it does say in the context of plea bargains, you know, you're going to charge for acts and you're going to plead guilty to acts and in exchange, we're going to immunize you for any other claim we might have been able to bring, right?

I don't think there's a written so broadly that they exempt you from, like if you murdered someone, if it turns out you murdered someone, they can't bring that charge against you. Right. It has to be within the confines of the existing known fact patterns. Yeah.

So let's take these three in sequence.

The first is the dropping of the case, how clear is it that the case was dropped because

“of the difficulty they were running into with the adversariality question before Judge Williams?”

It's not entirely clear. I think there are some kind of evidence that these, they did this in haste, like the documents that were signed by Todd Blanch are, like they're like, reading like the, it's like almost like a page torn out of a contract, it's not the type of thing that a attorney general would, it doesn't have like the bells and whistles of a normal attorney general order,

which is, I mean, it's kind of a sloppiness, it's kind of a hallmark of the administration, but it does seem that if they, you know, had the luxury of time, they would have made it look

a little bit neater, and so when I have a sense of the reason why they wanted to do this

as a settlement, and therefore do it while there was still a lawsuit, is so that the payment for this slush fund could come out of what's known as the judgment fund, which is a fund available almost exclusively for the federal government to pay out judgments or settlements and court cases. It's not a piggy bank that the government can just use for any project.

“So if you claim that you have to, at least, claim that this is part of a judicial, that”

this is to resolve a judicial proceeding in order to use that money. Right, if it's not related to the case, it's much harder to justify building it into, you know, taking the money from the judgment fund. Yeah. What is the judgment fund, and why does the administration get to create a slush fund out

of it? That doesn't seem like what it was for, there is no judgment here, help me out how clear is it that you can just take this fund and say, you know, here we will build a slush fund for paying my side of the political aisle for claims of a vindictive weaponization by the other side of the aisle.

So the judgment fund is essentially a permanent appropriation, kind of like a bottomless pit of funds to pay out judgments in civil litigation, judgments and settlements. People through the federal government all the time, they win, or there are settlements. The government owes out money. This is just an appropriated fund to pay litigation losses.

Yes. And the assumption is that the government will be responsible in using it. There has been criticism through the years that it's sometimes been abused and sometimes the government is more or less generous in paying out settlements, depending upon what it thinks of the folks on the other side.

And there are people who during the Democratic administration say, hey, you guys are paying out settlements to in the civil rights sphere, in environmental sphere, that are in excess of what reasonably plaintiffs stood to gain and taking to account the risk of the government had the case preceded. So then the judgment fund, statute, cross references, another statute that authorizes and

refer to the attorney general for defense of imminent litigation or suits against the United States shall be settled and paid in a manner similar to judgments in such cases. So in other words, you can pay settlements. Now that statute is very broad and very vague, it refers only to compromise settlements of claims.

It doesn't say this has to be a legit settlement, it doesn't say it can't be ridiculous. It doesn't even say that the money has to go to the plaintiffs themselves.

It doesn't expressly exclude third parties.

“So has it ever been used to, you know, so and so has a claim against the federal government?”

They give up that claim in exchange for the government setting up a fund to give money to other people. So there's an example of this that the Department of Justice cites and holds up as the comparison for why this is kosher. And that is a case called Keep Seagull, which was a class action brought by Native American

farmers who alleged that the federal government was discriminating against them in loan applications, the Department of Agriculture.

And the case was settled during the Obama administration for, I believe, around $760 million.

The idea was that the eligible Native American farmers would submit claims to the fund and any might have left over, which the government and the plaintiffs expected would be, maybe a pretty small amount, would go to nonprofits working on helping Native Americans some sort. But that doesn't strike me as comparable at all, because the fund is set up to compensate

the plaintiffs, that is the members of the class who brought the suit. Here, the one plaintiff drops the case and in exchange, the judgment fund is being tapped to set up a fund, the beneficiaries of whom we don't know who they're going to be. But they're not the plaintiff. And so it seems like the settlement is for somebody entirely other than the people who were

parties to the litigation. Yes. Yes. Exactly. As it turned out, the left over money in the key single case turned out, unexpectedly,

turned out to be huge, turned out to be like a majority of the fund.

“Like the farmer who's got, I think, $300 million, and these nonprofits got $380 million.”

So it was mammoth, and it became a very controversial. But the courts conclude that they couldn't do anything about it because the district court had already signed off on the final judgment that approved that provision at that, and at the time, no one knew how large that leftover pot would be.

But yes, you're exactly right here by design, the entire pot is going to third parties.

And unlike the third party, at the very least, in the key single, the third party had a little bit of connection to the plaintiffs and that they were charities working on Native American causes, in a case involving alleged discrimination against Native Americans. Here, there's no real connection between the third parties and the plaintiff except kind of a corrupt one that they're kind of his political cronies, and that they're all victims of

the same fictitious weaponization of the justice department.

“Yeah, exactly, and it kind of ironic in the key single case, and was something that Republicans”

hated, and God very mad about, and they were here in Zion Congress, well, they were right to be mad about this aspect of it, that, in my opinion, that, you know, having a settlement that operates as a windfall for nonprofit groups that are not, you know, that

I don't have a problem with their anger at that.

“I do have a problem with their doubling down on the premise to, for a much worse abuse, that's”

not accidental. But the irony is that they weren't just angry at it, but they actually did something about it.

Three months after taking office, Jeff Sessions, who, once upon a time, was Trump's first

attorney general, put out a memo, basically saying, you know, no settlements that give out line of third parties, unless it's called directly remedies the harm that is taught to be addressed, and then they doubled down on that, and they removed even that exception

“in 2020, and Merrick Garland rolled it back a little bit, so that you can have third party”

payments, if there's a strong connection to the underlying violation.

And then Pam Bondi, literally on her first full day in office, it should a memo revoking

the Garland memo, and which had the effect of reinstating the stricter policies of the first Trump administration. So they're doing something that Todd Blanch is doing something that is not only ridiculous and outrageous, and far beyond the scope of the example that he originally, you know, that he sights as president, but that is itself pretty much explicitly banned by his own administration,

by his predecessor, and it's something that the Trump administration, two Trump administrations have fought against when they didn't want the new one named Trump. So let's review the bidding so far. They unambiguously have the right to drop the case, and there may not be a case at all, because there's a adversariality question with respect to the parties, and the issue is

hastened by the possible complications to the case, which in any event they would lose because of statute of limitation issues, and even if they didn't lose because of statute of limitation issues, they would not prevail in a large dollar sense, though the case has some significant merit morally that that a wrong was in fact done. They have the authority to drop the case.

The terms of settlement, the creation of this third party fun, is wildly outside of anything

the justice department has done before, even when it has aired by creating third party accidently, creating significant third party compensation mechanisms in settlements, these third party compensation mechanisms, numerous times the size of any prior one intentional and wholly unrelated to the nature of the claims in the suit. But it's not clearly illegal under the terms of the appropriations bill, right?

Yeah, it's not clearly illegal. I mean, one could make various arguments about how these abuses of the Judgment Fund exceed the statutes that provide allow for settlements, but it's really all new terrain legally. Cool has standing to challenge it.

“There's the rub, and it's not clear that anyone does, but you need to have, in order”

to have standing, you need to have an injury that is concrete and particularized, or terms that the Supreme Court is used, that is imminent, not not speculative, and that

by a judicial decision, and being a taxpayer who's outraged at this waste of money does not suffice.

“What a fucking Latisha James, who gets to walk into court and say, "I was indicted by”

this administration over the objection of grand jurors."

They've basically announced publicly intention to persecute me in public.

The president has yelled at Pam Bondi in public about the fact that she should be bringing cases against me. They keep going back to grandjuries and trying to get me re-indicted. They indicted me illegally, according to eventually the fourth circuit, we'll say as much. And by the way, they keep threatening to do it again and again, and again, if anybody

is a victim of weaponization of the Justice Department, I am a victim of overt weaponization

“of the just overt proud and declared weaponization, to the point that people in the Justice”

Department are showing up at my house in creepy trench coats, literally, and yet I am ineligible to apply for compensation from the weaponization fund, because I am a Democrat, and I am complaining about weaponization by a Republican administration, which in a viewpoint discriminatory fashion has engineered this fund to disfavor people like me who have complaints against them and enrich only their political allies who have complaints against my political

party. So I, A, contend that I have a unique injury. These people are coming after me, they deny me access to the fund that they created, which

they are deploying in a viewpoint discriminatory fashion in violation of the First Amendment.

Why do I not have standing? Well, that's interesting, first I would say that she is not excluded by virtue, not excluded by being virtue of Democrat, there is nothing in the description of the fund that says that. In fact, Todd Blanche, who coincidentally was testifying before Congress on Tuesday, said, "Look,

Hunter Biden can apply if he wants," which is clever thing to say, because as Todd Blanche knows, Hunter Biden was prosecuted under a Democratic administration. So he could, it's a clever example to use of how, you know, even if the fund is limited to Democratic administration abuses that could cover abuses against just about anyone even the president's son.

You could, and I suppose it's possible that they could write it a little bit more broadly to get it around Latisha James' type suit by kind of removing the limitation to Democrat administration, which was a little bit ambiguous in the original. I mean, but it's there, if you were prosecuted by this administration, if your name is Kilmarabrago Garcia or Jim Kome or Latisha James or Monica McGyver, it doesn't matter

how strong your claim is, you are ineligible, and that strikes me as a non-nutual viewpoint

discriminatory first amendment problem.

I could see someone bringing that case. I mean, the Trump administration would respond by saying, "Look, it's not, it's a limitation on who the wrongdoer is, Hunter Biden can bring his case any number of people of the leftists, criminals, whoever who are targeted by the Department of Justice and Democratic administration are welcome to apply.

The government can pick or choose the wrongs that it wants to remedy.

“For example, the 9/11 fund, if memory serves, I think, did not provide Congress.”

Yes, but the first amendment is the same. You could, you know, that didn't apply to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, if memory serves, and or Jim is definitely didn't apply to other terrorist acts that were unrelated.

Of course, it wasn't favoring one type of victim of its own actions. The Trump administration sometimes treats the federal government under the prior administration

“as though there's no continuity between the entities, right?”

And I don't know that you can do that as a, I'm not sure if the principal resides in the

first amendment or if it resides in some equal protection principle, but it seems to

me that Latisha James has a legit complaint, at least as an equitable matter, that, you set up a fund on, on weaponization that allows, you know, frankly, meritless claims by people, you know, who actually committed crimes while excluding highly merited claims by people who were the subject of actual weaponization, I would be troubled by that if I were a federal judge.

“Yeah, I mean, I think that such a plaintiff might emerge and might try to mount a first amendment”

argument based on the quite clearly intended design to benefit people of a certain viewpoint, which the government can, you know, with top blanches already been pushing back on and the government, if they're smart and if they're allowed to be smart, can try to somewhat definitely mitigate in the construction of the claims process, but then they're also, as you say, an equal protection component about the type of victim, that I think is probably

a pill battle, because the government, as I said, can, can, is allowed to pick and choose but what types of victims it wants to harms it wants to remedy, but, you know, these are, these are things that could be raised litigation and obviously the judges, or I should hope it's obvious, the judges, you know, think this whole thing stinks, they're going to think this whole thing stinks to high heaven and may look more favorably than otherwise

on attempts to kill it. All right, let's talk about this third category, which has nothing

to do with the fund, it's just a kind of carousel that comes out the next day saying, "Oh, by the way, you're immunized for everything from the dawn of time until now." How is that possibly lawful and again, who has the, who has standing to challenge it, or is it simply a matter of the next administration tears it up and says such a thing is not consistent with

“public policy and no such contract is enforceable? Yeah, I think it's, it's the latter. I don't”

see how England would have standing to challenge a non-enforcement decision. I mean, arguably, there could be some type of competitor standing if one organization is in the, say, there's a real estate company that is competing with, with the Trump organization and the government is going to have to them, but now I have for the Trumps, but I think that's, we're very hard to imagine that's prevailing and it's, I do think a future department of justice would

treat it as presumptively invalid. It's not clear that how Todd Blanch has the authority even to say

this, even a dude is part of a settlement. It's really weird that Blanch, the second part of the

deal was, this part of the deal was separate from the other part, both in, in, in what it is, and also in time. It wasn't part of the settlement agreement. It was posted and apparently signed, the dated the following day, somewhat conveniently, right after Blanch finishes congressional testimony. Blanch is not a party to the case. Sorry, it says at the beginning of it that this is being done to effectuate the settlement agreement and the anti-weaponization fund,

which is kind of the same language used in his order the previous day that kind of set up the fund, but it's kind of headscratcher because this release of liability has nothing to do with the fund and Blanch just posted it yesterday and but he's just not a party of the case. He's not exercising

signed by the IRS's top official, so it's very strange and the self-dealing arguments are even stronger here than with the fund and they're quite strong there, but they're even stronger here, but this is just, you know, I'm going to give you the attorney general who you appointed and I'm going to give you, you know, get out of, well, if not jail, get out of civil liability,

“free fund for forever and ever, so I think this would be torn up by a future department of justice”

assuming that they, I mean, they're not going to go after Trump in a civil manager just for the sake of doing so, I don't think, but if, for example, the New York Times reported that there's an

ongoing audit of Trump that could well cost them over a hundred million dollars. They report this,

I think, in 2024. The department of justice, the IRS might well reopen that under a new democratic administration at lit and then once the audit's completed, suit Trump for the money and let Trump argue that he was somehow given a immunity by his own attorney general.

“So the net effect of this is not that it prevents the government from seeking liability in some”

future administration against Trump or his entities or his members of his family. It's really that it provides an argument that would have to be overcome to Trump that the attorney general signed this document that immunized me. Well, I mean, it purports to, it purports to, uh, prevent and no, he would, but he would argue so some future attorney general, say attorney general, Eric Columbus comes in and tears out that, that tears up that document and the IRS brings this

lawsuit for say a hundred million dollars and Trump argues, no, that's precluded by the

blanch document. And the, the real consequence of this is that the government would have this extra step of arguing in court that the document is not enforceable. Yeah, and that's analogous, for example, the say of Trump decide to pardon himself on his last aid office and there are strong arguments as to why a self pardon is is invalid. Like, like say that he committed some clearly unofficial act that was a crime that that was a federal crime and he pardoned self on the last day.

The future department of justice could choose to prosecute him for that and lead courts sort out whether or not his self pardon was valid. All right. I want to close this with a moment on the

“ethics questions, vis-a-vis Todd Blanch. You're a member of in good standing of what bar?”

You meaning Todd Blanch or the meaning you Eric Columbus, uh, the District of Columbia. And if you were to say go back into the justice department and be assigned to work on, or let's say you were asked to work on or you were at a political level where you could assign yourself work on a matter that involved a recent former client and you engineered or supervised or signed off on a settlement that allowed the creation of a giant slash fund at the political

disposal of that worth $1.776 billion to benefit the friends and political allies of your former

client. And the next day you signed a statement immunizing from from civil liability, your former client, from the dawn of time till now, all and the and the person's businesses and and family members for any civil liability for anything and maybe criminal liability, too. What you fear that somebody would file a bar complaint with the District of Columbia saying you're not allowed to use your current position to enrich your former client that that is an actual conflict of interest, not an appearance

of a conflict of interest, an actual conflict of interest, and you're not allowed to participate in

Well, to that question, I think that the worst case scenario for Todd Blanch would be that he is

disparate from practicing law and he could have a long, happy and wealthy life without doing it, and this would be many years down the road in any case. And for that matter, even if he is disparate, he could still be attorney general without being a member of the bar. Well, he wouldn't be able to actually sign briefs in that appear in court. Correct, correct, although before being attorney, before this administration, I've looked into

this because, you know, I have occasionally wanted to be attorney general, and that whole not being

able to represent that I'm an attorney thing would be a problem. Well, actually, before this

administration, the attorney general's name did not appear on briefs. It's one of the weirder, but probably least meaningful novelty is, if you will, that this administration has introduced, I believe it's actually quite possible that if you're not a member of a bar, you cannot be paid by the attorney general. There's actually a statute regarding that. It's a grave injustice in my life, I'm afraid, but if you were in Todd Blanch's role,

I mean, you would fear for your law license, right? So it's interesting, and I'm trying to

“remember the DOJ ethics rules that I used to be subject to regulations, and I think in some cases”

criminal statutes. I don't think that the setting up of the fund itself is an issue because it's does not benefit Trump himself in the financial sense, and I believe it actually says, in the settlement agreement that the plaintiffs are not allowed to get any money from the fund. Now, you might say, and quite possibly with good reason, that even so Blanch was involved in settling a case that was brought by his former client, and therefore he should have been

recused from anything arising out of that. Now, technically, the settlement, he was just effectuating something already done by the settlement agreement. So, you know, maybe it's permissible, I don't know,

“but then you get to the harder question. I think is the the civil liability immunity,”

because the settlement agreement does not report to address that, and Blanch's kind of claiming it does, which is weird, but if it doesn't, then he's just kind of, you know, he's freelancing immunity to his former client. I sat in a court for six weeks with Todd Blanch, while he represented this man in a criminal trial. You know, that criminal trial is the New York state case is still

under appeal in the second circuit. He was council of record in the underlying case.

I don't see how you can, you know, as a lawyer for a client with a criminal conviction currently, before the New York first division of pallet court in New York, and they're still trying to get it removed to federal court. How you can, how you can represent that client, you know, got that, and you are engineering immunity for him from the federal government. I just don't see how that's

“possibly ethical. I think there are some very serious problems there. Folks, we're going to leave”

it there. Eric Columbus, thank you for joining us. You can read Eric's and Anna Bauer's lengthy examination and detailed examination of this series of matters on law fair. Eric remind me what is the headline of the piece what's it called? It's called the president who sued himself. The president who sued himself about sums it up. Eric, thanks for joining us today. Thanks Ben. The law fair podcast is produced by the Law Fair Institute. You can get ad free versions of this

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