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In a legal showdown in Washington, former President Donald Trump has initiated a $10 billion lawsuit against the IRS and the Treasury Department. The lawsuit alleges these federal bodies failed to prevent the unauthorized release of his tax details to the media between 2018 and 2020.
Filed in a Florida federal court on Thursday, this legal action sees Trump joined by his sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as well as the Trump Organization, as co-plaintiffs.
The complaint asserts that the unauthorized disclosure of their tax information inflicted “reputational and financial damage, public humiliation, unjustly marred their business reputations, misrepresented them, and adversely impacted President Trump and the other Plaintiffs’ public image.”
In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn was handed a five-year prison sentence following his guilty plea for leaking tax data related to Trump and others to the press. Littlejohn, who operated under the name Chaz, provided sensitive information to The New York Times and ProPublica during the aforementioned period, an act prosecutors described as “unprecedented in IRS history.”
Littlejohn, known as Chaz, gave data to The New York Times and ProPublica between 2018 and 2020 in leaks that appeared to be “unparalleled in the IRS’s 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 tax for many years prior to 2020, and ProPublica in 2021 published a series about discrepancies in Trump’s records. Six years of Trump’s returns were later released by the then-Democratically controlled House Ways and Means Committee.
Trump’s suit states that Littlejohn’s disclosures to the news organizations “caused reputational and financial harm to Plaintiffs and adversely impacted President Trump’s support among voters in the 2020 presidential election.”
Littlejohn stole tax records of other mega-billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
The president’s suit comes after the U.S. Treasury Department announced it has cut its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, earlier this week, after Littlejohn, who worked for the firm, was charged and subsequently imprisoned for leaking tax information to news outlets about thousands of the country’s wealthiest people, including the president.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the time of the announcement 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.”
Representatives of the White House, Treasury and IRS were not immediately available for comment.