Jan. 29 (UPI) — President Donald Trump sued the federal government on Thursday for $10 billion in alleged damages over an Internal Revenue Service employee’s leak of his tax returns to news outlets during his first administration.
The civil lawsuit, which also names Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, two of the president’s adult children, and their Trump Organization company as plaintiffs, accuses IRS and the U.S. Treasury of failing to protect Trump’s confidential tax return information from public disclosure.
“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,” Trump’s filing states, claiming he, his sons and their company suffered “irreparable harm” to their reputations and financial interests.
Charles Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor, is serving a five-year prison sentence, handed down in January 2024, for pleading guilty to charges of disclosing Trump’s tax return in 2019 and 2020 to The New York Times, ProPublica and other news organizations.
Trump, during his initial presidential campaign in 2016, broke campaign norms by refusing to make his tax returns public, prompting protests from Democrats and critics.
Articles were produced from Littlejohn’s leak, revealing that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 and no federal income tax in 10 of the previous 15 years.
In the lawsuit, filed in Florida, Trump’s legal team alleges that Littlejohn sought employment with the IRS to gain access to Trump’s tax information and that he leaked it to the media organizations because he thought Trump was dangerous and that Americans should have the opportunity to see the tax returns of the sitting president.
“Mr. Littlejohn clearly committed his crimes, which the defendants allowed to occur, in order to improperly influence the results of the 2020 presidential election,” the lawsuit states.
The suit states that Trump did not know that violations were committed concerning his personal tax returns until the IRS told him in a letter on Jan. 29, 2024, that a contractor had been charged with leaking the information.
The lawsuit comes days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the cancelation of millions of dollars in contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, the government contractor that had employed Littlejohn when he worked at the IRS.
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