President Donald Trump and several of his family members sued the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion, alleging the government agencies failed to prevent his tax returns from being leaked.
The lawsuit, filed at a federal courthouse in Florida on Thursday, said Trump is bringing the suit in “his personal capacity.” The other plaintiffs include the Republican president’s eldest sons — Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump — as well as the Trump organization.
The civil complaint argues that the IRS and Treasury Department fell short in their obligation to stop the leak of the president’s tax records by Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor, in 2019 and 2020.
Littlejohn pleaded guilty in 2023 to leaking the president’s tax records to The New York Times, and he was sentenced to five years in prison the following year. In 2020, the newspaper published a report showing the billionaire president paid just $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 — and no federal income taxes for most of the prior 15 years.
At the time, Trump described the story as “Totally fake news. Made up. Fake.”
The suit alleges that the defendants “willfully, knowingly, and/or by gross negligence” illegally accessed the president’s confidential tax information.
“Defendants have caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, portrayed them in a false light, and negatively affected President Trump, and the other Plaintiffs’ public standing," the complaint said. It requested at least $10 billion in damages.
Spokespeople for the Treasury Department and the IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment from The Independent.
“The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people,” a representative for Trump’s legal team told CNBC on Thursday.
It is highly unusual for a president to sue their own administration, but Trump has pursued similar tactics in the past.
In October, the president reportedly demanded that the Department of Justice pay him $230 million in compensation for the multiple federal investigations into him. When asked about a potential settlement at the time, Trump said, “I guess they probably owe me a lot of money.”
The suit comes just three days after Scott Bessent, Trump’s treasury secretary, cancelled all department contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm where Littlejohn had been employed.
“Booz Allen failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service,” Bessent said in a statement.
Trump's tax returns have long drawn intense scrutiny due to his unprecedented refusal to release them during his first term, defying long-standing norms. In 2022, after he left office, Congress released six years of his returns showing he paid very little in federal income taxes for two years while in office.
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