President Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Eric Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and Treasury Department Thursday, blaming the federal agencies for leaks of their confidential tax information.
The Trump Organization, the first family’s business, is also listed as a plaintiff in the lawsuit filed in a Miami federal court.
“Defendants have caused Plaintiffs 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,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit comes after former IRS contractor Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn was convicted of leaking Trump’s tax returns – along with the filings of other wealthy individuals – to the New York Times and ProPublica.
Littlejohn, 40, pleaded guilty in October 2023 to one count of disclosure of tax return information and is serving a five-year prison sentence.
In a 2024 deposition, Littlejohn reportedly admitted to disclosing “Trump information [that] included all businesses that he had owned” to ProPublica, according to the lawsuit.
In the complaint, Trump’s legal team claims the outlet then falsely reported that the president’s tax returns contained “versions of fraud.”
“The IRS wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information about President Trump, his family, and the Trump Organization to the New York Times, ProPublica and other left-wing news outlets, which was then illegally released to millions of people,” Trump’s legal team said in a statement, according to multiple outlets. “President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable.”
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cancelled more than $21 million in contracts his department had with Booz Allen Hamilton – the consulting firm that employed Littlejohn.
“Booz Allen 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,” Bessent said in a statement.
Treasury’s press release noted that Littlejohn “stole and leaked the confidential tax returns and return information of hundreds of thousands of taxpayers.”
The lawsuit is at least the second time in his second term that Trump has sought damages from the federal government.
Last October, the president asked for a hefty financial settlement from the Justice Department to resolve his complaints of being improperly targeted by the FBI.
Trump demanded up to $230 million from the DOJ to resolve a pair of complaints filed in 2023 and 2024, the New York Times reported.
“They probably owe me a lot of money, but if I get money from our country, I’ll do something nice with it, like give it to charity or give it to the White House,” Trump told reporters last October.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
