That question is also independent of what you and Silvanus are asserting about the purpose of it. You treat it as Donald Trump began this lawsuit with the intention of using it to pay off his allies using the Justice Department, and that still doesn't make any sense. Someone else could have been the plaintiff, they could have class-actioned this and then made the settlement with the same outcome but no complaints from the judge and even less oversight. And Trump could have gotten paid from that himself after it was already settled.
This end result just makes no sense from that starting position.
At this point your rebuttal boils down to a variation of a nirvana fallacy: "I can imagine cleaner or less politically damaging ways this could have been done, therefore the interpretation that this process was improper must be wrong."
But that does not follow. Real-world institutional conduct is often messy, reactive, and constrained. The existence of hypothetical alternative mechanisms does not negate concerns about the mechanism actually used. More importantly, you still are not meaningfully engaging the core Article III issue.
The concern is not whether or not Trump had an underlying claim stemming from the Littlejohn leaks. The concern is whether this specific litigation functioned as a genuinely adversarial proceeding. That concern is reinforced by several factors taken together:
- Despite representing the IRS and Treasury Department by necessity, the DOJ under Trump and Blanche repeatedly signaled that Trump himself was effectively being treated as the department’s primary client, including - but far from limited to - dismissals tied to the idea that attorneys who had been part of cases where Trump was the defendant had "sued their boss" and therefore had no place in the DOJ.
- DOJ reportedly failed to raise several obvious and potentially dispositive defenses, including statute-of-limitations issues, questions regarding contractor liability, and the mismatch between the claimed damages and statutory limits.
- Trump withdrew the case almost immediately after the judge indicated a willingness to seriously examine adverseness and jurisdictional concerns.
- The practical outcome then appears to have been substantially replicated through executive action outside the litigation process altogether.
Any one of those facts
individually might be explainable. The issue is the cumulative pattern.
And notably, your response does not really address that pattern. Instead, you keep arguing that if the administration wanted an improper outcome, they could have pursued cleaner alternatives. "I would have done it differently, therefore allegations of impropriety are ridiculous" is not a serious argument, because people aren't optimization engines who unerringly pursue the most efficient path.
Moreover, you're incorrectly claiming that myself and others are claiming that the $1.8 billion + tax audit immunity must have been the exact intended outcome, and that to assume otherwise - that he actually did intend to take $10 billion - necessarily compromises the argument of impropriety...as if the entire thing happened in a vacuum and people (including the judge) weren't calling red flags on the case. And that's just not tenable.
Nobody is required to assume the final result or the maximalist original one was the only acceptable objective. Political actors often scale back once scrutiny increases. A reduced but still highly favorable outcome after judicial pressure is not evidence against impropriety; if anything, it can be entirely consistent with an effort to salvage a politically sustainable version of the original goal.
So the issue is not whether some compensation process for leak victims could lawfully exist in the abstract. The issue is whether this particular sequence of litigation conduct and executive action reflects a genuinely adversarial constitutional process or something more institutionally compromised.
