The Internal Revenue Service building May 4, 2021, in Washington.
Patrick Semansky/AP
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Patrick Semansky/AP
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is suing the IRS and Treasury Department for $10 billion, as he accuses the federal agencies of a failure to prevent a leak of the president’s tax information to news outlets between 2018 and 2020.
The suit, filed in a Florida federal court Thursday, includes the president’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump organization as plaintiffs.
The filing alleges that the leak of Trump and the Trump Organization’s 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, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn of Washington, D.C. — who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and national security tech firm — was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about Trump and others to news outlets.
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.