WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump is suing the IRS and Treasury Department for $10 billion, alleging a failure to prevent the leak of his tax information to news outlets between 2018 and 2020.
Details of the Lawsuit
The suit, filed Thursday in a Florida federal court, also includes Trump’s sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and the Trump Organization as plaintiffs. The filing claims the leak of confidential tax records caused “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.”
In 2024, Charles Edward Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about Trump and others to news organizations.
Prosecutors said Littlejohn, also known as Chaz, provided data to The New York Times and ProPublica between 2018 and 2020 in leaks described as “unparalleled in the IRS’s history.” The disclosure violated IRS Code 6103, a strict confidentiality law.
Previous Tax Information Reports
The New York Times reported in 2020 that Trump did not pay federal income tax for many years prior to 2020, and ProPublica published a series in 2021 detailing 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 also stole tax records of other billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
Recent Treasury Department Action
The lawsuit follows the U.S. Treasury Department’s announcement earlier this week that it had cut its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton. This action came after Littlejohn, a former employee of the firm, was charged and imprisoned for leaking tax information about thousands of the country’s wealthiest people, including the president.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated 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.
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