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I don’t often say this about a 56-page court ruling, but there are so many satisfying passages in U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams’ smackdown of President Trump’s flagrantly unethical lawsuit against the IRS and Treasury Department that it’s hard to pick a favorite. Her ruling has been described as “blistering,” “stunning,” “scathing” and “damning.”

You can almost picture Williams’ revulsion at the audacity of one of Trump’s most glaring — and unconstitutional — attempts at self-dealing. Her disdain for the president’s lawyers, including Acting Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche, is so great that she not only chastises them, but refers them to their various home bars for possible sanctions.

As you recall, in January, Trump and his sons sued the federal government for $10 billion, claiming they’d been irreparably harmed by the 2019 leak of their corporate and personal tax returns. (Nothing that a cool $10 billion couldn’t assuage!) Even though a third-party contractor was responsible and is currently serving a five-year prison sentence for the theft, the Trumps blamed the IRS, a division of the U.S. Treasury Department.

But the IRS and Treasury Department, as well as the Department of Justice, which would defend the government against Trump’s lawsuit, are all part of the executive branch. And because Trump is the head of the executive branch, he is the plaintiff and, effectively, the defendant. (Reminds me of that famous scene in “Chinatown” in which Faye Dunaway reveals her family’s dark secret to Jack Nicholson: “She’s my sister and my mother!”)

You don’t have to be a lawyer to know the same person can’t be on both sides of a lawsuit.

The Constitution is clear on this point: If you’re going to file a federal lawsuit, you’d better have a real adversary. It’s called the “case and controversy” doctrine. In April, Williams ordered both sides to explain themselves.

Then in May, two days before their briefs were due, the Trump Department of Justice announced that the case had been settled. No briefs required! Trump would receive an apology, and the government would establish a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund to compensate victims of government “lawfare.” This was widely seen as an attempt to funnel money to bad actors like the miscreants convicted of crimes for their role in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Also, Trump and his sons would receive sweeping immunity from IRS audits of past tax returns.

The backlash was intense and bipartisan, and Blanche quickly announced that the fund was dead. (Could it ever rise from the grave like a zombie? Unclear.)

Dozens of outraged former federal judges filed a motion asking Williams to reopen the case. The entire smelly thing, they wrote, was “a fraud on the court.”

Williams, appointed to the federal bench by President Obama in 2010, granted the motion. She said she wanted to investigate whether the settlement had been “premised on deception,” and ordered the parties — Trump on one side, Trump essentially on the other — to explain to Williams exactly why the attorneys involved shouldn’t be punished for creating a sham legal case. They could not make a cogent argument.

On Monday, Williams released her ruling, striking the settlement down. The lawsuit, she wrote, was filed “in bad faith for the improper purpose of dishonestly advancing a political narrative.”

The architect of the sham lawsuit and slimy settlement is Blanche, Trump’s former personal criminal attorney and current nominee for U.S. attorney general. In May, Blanche told a Senate subcommittee that he didn’t have to submit the “settlement” to the court because there was no case anymore. Williams disagreed. Blanche’s testimony, she wrote, was “at best, misleading and, at worst, disingenuous.”

Blanche’s capacity to speak for both sides of the lawsuit, sign a settlement agreement on behalf of all the parties, then repudiate part of the agreement, wrote the judge, “demonstrates that there was only one party whose interests were being represented throughout the case.” And, Williams noted, “It is risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the parties.”

The whole lawsuit, wrote Williams, was “non-adversarial, collusive, and jurisdictionally improper.” In plain English, totally bogus.

“This case,” she noted, “is part of Mr. Trump’s pattern of misusing the courts to serve political purposes.”

So what kind of punishment should be imposed on attorneys such as Blanche, who blatantly disregard their constitutional obligations in order to curry favor with the boss and, say, get nominated as U.S. attorney general in return?

Williams ordered the court to send her ruling to the State Bar of New York, where more than 100 former federal and........

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