Trump sues IRS and Treasury for $10 billion over leaked tax information : NPR
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, accusing federal agencies of failing to prevent a leak of the president’s tax information to the media between 2018 and 2020.
The suit, filed Thursday in federal court in Florida, includes the President’s sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. as well as 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, misrepresented them, and negatively affected the public reputation of President Trump and the other plaintiffs.”
In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn of Washington, D.C. — who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense technology and national security 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 “unprecedented in IRS history,” prosecutors said.
The disclosure violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest federal privacy laws.
The Times reported in 2020 that Trump had not paid federal income taxes for many years before 2020, and ProPublica published a series in 2021 on discrepancies in Trump’s records. Six years of Trump’s returns were later released by the House Ways and Means Committee, then controlled by Democrats.
Trump’s suit says Littlejohn’s disclosures to news organizations “caused harm to plaintiffs’ reputations and finances and negatively impacted President Trump’s support among voters in the 2020 presidential election.”
Littlejohn stole the tax records of other megabillionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
The president’s lawsuit comes after the U.S. Treasury Department announced it had terminated its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton earlier this week after Littlejohn, who worked for the company, was indicted and later imprisoned for leaking tax information to media outlets about thousands of the nation’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 confidential taxpayer information that it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service.”
Officials from the White House, Treasury and IRS were not immediately available for comment.
