JUDICIAL SCRUTINY: President Trump had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day in the courts yesterday with one federal judge reviving his lawsuit against the IRS and another ordering that his name be taken off the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington.

  Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami re-opened Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS that was settled with immunity from IRS prosecution for the President, his family, and businesses as well as the establishment of a $1.8 billion fund for people who claim they were victims of political prosecution under the Biden administration. Judge Williams’s decision was in response to filings by a group of 35 former federal judges who urged her to re-examine the circumstances of the settlement.

  Almost simultaneously a federal judge in Virginia ordered the Justice Department to cease creation of the so- called “anti-weaponization fund.” 

  Trump had sued the IRS for $10 billion for leaking his tax returns revealing that in some years he paid virtually nothing in federal taxes. The President sued an agency that he controls and settled to his own benefit in a deal rubber stamped by the Justice Department, which he also controls.

  Judge Williams said that she was “empowered to investigate serious misconduct” in any case before her, and ordered Trump’s lawyers to tell her by June 12 whether the lawsuit should be formally reopened because “the court was the victim of a fraud.”

  She also demanded that Trump’s lawyers answer whether he had colluded with his own government to settle the case “to avoid judicial scrutiny.”

NAMING RIGHTS: Judge Christopher Cooper in Washinton  ruled yesterday that Donald Trump’s name must be stripped from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and all its branding, saying that, “Congress gave the Kennedy Center its name, and only Congress can change it.”

  Trump responded with a 580-word tirade on his social media against “a judge appointed by Barack Hussein Obama” and a declaration that he will abandon the Kennedy Center as one of his Washington “improvement” projects.

  Judge Cooper wrote in a 94-page opinion that a law passed by Congress in 1964 made “crystal clear” that the institution was to be named for President Kennedy. The Kennedy Center’s Trump-controlled board re-named it in December “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.” 

  Cooper also ruled that the Kennedy Center may not close this summer for two years of renovations. He found that the center’s board had been “derelict” in abandoning programming as well as its legal responsibility to maintain the center as a memorial to the assassinated president.

  At the direction of President Trump, the center would be stripped to its framing and almost entirely re-built. Trump in his tirade said that the center is so badly falling apart that it is a danger to life and that it “was to be transformed by the Trump Administration into the Finest Facility of its kind, anywhere in the World.”

  A spokeswoman said they would appeal, signing her statement as the “Trump Kennedy Center Vice President of Public Relations.”

BONDI BEACH: Former Attorney General Pam Bondi in a closed congressional hearing yesterday refused to answer questions about her handling the disclosure of files on the late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, saying it had all been the responsibility of her then deputy Todd Blanche, who is now the acting attorney general following Bondi’s firing. 

  The meeting was not recorded and Bondi was not under oath, but a transcript is expected to be released.

  Despite not being under oath, Bondi could still be prosecuted if she’s caught lying to the committee. 

  When the Justice Department released files on the late sex trafficker, names of big shots who had sex with underage girls were redacted and some names of victims were not. Millions of documents were never released in violation of a law requiring it. 

  One member of congress said, “Even the coverup is being covered up.”

TUNNEL RESCUE: Five men trapped in a flooded maze of caves in Laos have been brought out by rescue divers. The men who had been hunting for gold survived in a chamber for more than a week before they were brought out in an operation that took several days

  Seven men had been hunting for gold when monsoon rains flooded the caves. Two men remain missing.

  The cave was so tight in some areas that a diver couldn’t even turn around. For the divers, it was a five-hour trip to reach the men and return to the surface.

POKE IN THE EYE: The suddenly-installed new executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes” sent the staff a cluelessly arrogant memo after the firing of his predecessor and two excellent correspondents.

  Nick Bilton, who has no prior experience in television, wrote that: “I’m here to lead this show, not preserve it under glass. That means honoring what works and being honest about what doesn’t. I have a notebook full of ideas. Some are about the show itself. Some are about the next generation of correspondents.”

  Cecilia Vega, one of the two fired correspondents, said in a statement that “60” had already changed under the network’s editorial chief Bari Weiss, installed by corporate boss David Ellison. “In recent months, my producing teams and I have experienced efforts to insert political bias into our stories,” she said. “Reporting teams have held back on submitting story pitches about important news topics out of fear of the internal repercussions. Let’s call this what it is: censorship, both imposed and self-driven.” 

THE SPIN RACK: Five people were killed yesterday when a bus on Interstate 95 in Virginia slammed into an SUV, causing a chain reaction involving five vehicles. A family of four from Greenfield, Massachusetts all died.

BELOW THE FOLD: President Trump’s doctor, Sean Barbabella, wrote in his post-physical assessment that Trump “remains in excellent health, demonstrating strong cardiac, pulmonary, neurological, and overall physical function.”

  He obviously has not read Trump’s social media feed.

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