The Internal Revenue Service building on May 4, 2021 in Washington.
Patrick Semansky/AP
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Patrick Semansky/AP
WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump is suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion, while accusing federal agencies of failing to prevent a leak of the president’s tax information to the media between 2018 and 2020.
The lawsuit, filed Thursday in federal court in Florida, includes as plaintiffs the president’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and the Trump organization.
The filing alleges that the leak of Trump and the Trump Organization’s confidential tax records caused “financial and reputational harm, public embarrassment, unfairly tarnished their business reputations, misrepresented them, and adversely affected President Trump and the public reputations of the other plaintiffs.”
In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn of Washington, D.C., who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a national security and defense technology company, was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about Trump and others to the media.
Littlejohn, known as Chaz, provided data to The New York Times and ProPublica between 2018 and 2020 in leaks that appeared “unparalleled in IRS history,” prosecutors said.
The disclosure violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal statute.
The Times reported in 2020 that Trump did not pay federal income taxes for many years before 2020, and ProPublica in 2021 published a series about discrepancies in Trump’s records. Six years of Trump’s statements were later released by the then-Democratic-controlled House Ways and Means Committee.
Trump’s lawsuit claims that Littlejohn’s disclosures to news organizations “caused plaintiffs’ financial and reputational harm and negatively affected President Trump’s support among voters in the 2020 presidential election.”
Littlejohn stole tax records from other mega-millionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
The president’s lawsuit comes after the U.S. Treasury Department announced it had cut its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton earlier this week after Littlejohn, who worked for the company, was charged and later jailed for leaking tax information to the media about thousands of the country’s richest people, including the president.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the time of the announcement that the company “failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including sensitive taxpayer information to which it had access through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service.”
Representatives from the White House, Treasury and IRS were not immediately available for comment.