President Donald Trump, Don Jr., Eric Trump, and the Trump organization are suing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the U.S. Treasury Department for $10 billion over the federal agencies’ failure to prevent alleged leaks of President Trump’s tax information during his first term, which was given to several news outlets.
The suit, filed in a Florida court on Jan. 29, and which includes Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and the Trump Organization as plaintiffs, alleges that both government agencies failed their “duty to safeguard and protect Plaintiffs’ confidential tax returns and related tax return information from such unauthorized inspection and public disclosure.”
From these actions, the filing claims that the government 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 2023, Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn, a former government contractor with the IRS, pleaded guilty to one count of disclosure of tax return information.
Littlejohn admitted to leaking tax records associated with President Trump to The New York Times and to providing information about thousands of the country’s wealthiest individuals, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, to ProPublicabetween 2018 and 2020.
Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison.
In 2020, The New York Times reported that President Trump did not pay federal income tax for several years before 2020. Additionally, in 2021, ProPublica released a list of Trump’s tax documents containing “versions of fraud.”
The suit asserts that ProPublica’s reporting falsely accuses President Trump of tax fraud.
The suit against both government agencies comes after the Treasury Department announced it had ended its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and national security tech firm, after Littlejohn, an employee of the firm, was charged after his violation of one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal statute, IRS Code 6103.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent affirmed during 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.”
