Trump, sons, company sue IRS over tax records leak

President Donald Trump, his two eldest sons and his family business have filed a lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Treasury Department over alleged leaks of confidential tax information, court records showed Thursday.

Plaintiffs seek at least $10 billion in damages case in Miami federal court.

The civil complaint alleges that the IRS and Treasury failed in their obligations to prevent the leak of these tax records by former IRS employee Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn in 2019 and 2020.

In addition to Trump, the plaintiffs include his sons, Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump Organization, run by Eric Trump and his sons.

“The IRS mistakenly allowed a fraudulent, 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 organizations, which was then illegally disclosed to millions of people,” a spokesperson for Trump’s legal team said in a statement to CNBC.

“President Trump continues to hold accountable those who have wronged America and Americans,” the spokesman said.

The lawsuit was filed three days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said his department was canceling all contracts with the consulting firm. Booz Allen Hamilton Theft and leak of confidential tax returns in connection with the company’s contractor, Littlejohn.

Littlejohn, 40, is serving a five-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in October 2023 to one count of disclosing tax return information.

He admitted to leaking Trump’s tax records to The New York Times and also admitted to leaking records on wealthy individuals to the news outlet ProPublica.

The news lawsuit states that Littlejohn admitted to “revealing information about Trump” in his 2024 deposition [that] He included all of his businesses in investigative news source ProPublica.

The lawsuit alleges that ProPublica’s subsequent report on Trump’s tax documents claimed the records contained “fraudulent versions.”

Although this quote appeared in ProPublica’s October 2019 report, it comes from Nancy Wallace, a professor of finance and real estate at the University of California-Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Wallace was one of a dozen real estate professionals interviewed by ProPublica who said they had seen no clear explanation for the “many inconsistencies in the documents,” according to the report.

“Defendants caused Plaintiffs reputational and financial harm, caused public embarrassment, unfairly damaged their business reputation, falsely portrayed them, and negatively affected the public reputation of President Trump and other Plaintiffs,” the lawsuit states.

It is almost unheard of for a sitting president to sue his own administration, and the exorbitant damages sought raises various conflict of interest issues.

But Trump has reportedly made similar moves in the recent past: The New York Times reported in October that Trump was seeking $230 million from the Justice Department in compensation for past investigations of him.