Trump claims that the IRS effectively permitted Littlejohn to make the “unlawful disclosures knowingly—or at the very least negligently or with gross negligence—because they willfully failed to establish appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to ensure the security and confidentiality of Plaintiffs’ confidential taxpayer information and protect from the exact unlawful disclosures that occurred.”
President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, claiming that the agency owes him at least $10 billion after a contractor unlawfully leaked some of Trump’s tax returns.
According to CBS News, the lawsuit was filed in a Miami-based federal court on Thursday.
In court documents, attorneys for Trump claim that the president and two of his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr., suffered a wide range of damages as a direct result of the leak.
“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 lawsuit alleges.
Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, is also named as a co-plaintiff to the lawsuit.
CBS News notes that Internal Revenue Service contractor Charles Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison in 2024 for leaking Trump’s tax returns. Investigators later determined that Littlejohn had most likely sent a storage device containing the tax information to ProPublica, which has reported on Trump’s taxes in the past.
The New York Times later reported that Trump’s 2016 returns indicated that the billionaire had only paid $750 in federal income taxes. In 2021, his first year in office, Trump paid another $750 to the federal government. He otherwise has never publicly released his tax returns, breaking with longstanding tradition largely adhered to by past presidents.
At the time of the leaks, Littlejohn was working as a contractor with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. Prosecutors said that Littlejohn “abused his position” and “weaponized his access to unmasked taxpayer data to further his own personal, political agenda, believing that he was above the law.”
The lawsuit does not name Booz Allen Hamilton or Littlejohn as defendants, but cites the contractor’s crimes as evidence that the firm “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.”
Trump claims that the IRS effectively permitted Littlejohn to make the “unlawful disclosures knowingly—or at the very least negligently or with gross negligence—because they willfully failed to establish appropriate administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to ensure the security and confidentiality of Plaintiffs’ confidential taxpayer information and protect from the exact unlawful disclosures that occurred.”
Richard Painter, the former Whiter House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, told The New York Times that the lawsuit and its $10 billion demand raise significant ethical questions.
“It’s an enormous conflict of interest,” Painter told the Times. “[Trump’s] own appointees could turn around and say: ‘Let’s give the Trump family a couple of billion. That’s a fair sell.’”
Sources
Trump and his sons sue IRS and US Treasury over leaked tax information
Trump sues IRS and Treasury for $10 billion, accusing agencies of letting his tax returns leak
Trump’s Lawsuit Against I.R.S. Creates ‘Enormous Conflict of Interest’
Join the conversation!