Washington– president Donald Trump He is suing the IRS and the Treasury Department for $10 billion, and accuses federal agencies of failing to prevent it Leaking tax information to the president To the media between 2018 and 2020.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Florida on Thursday, includes President Eric Trump’s children, Donald Trump Jr., and 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 reputation, portrayed them in a false light, and adversely affected President Trump and the public standing of the other plaintiffs.”
In 2024, a former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn The Washington, D.C., native — who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and national security technology company — was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty to leaking tax information about Trump and others to the media.
Prosecutors said Littlejohn, known as Chaz, provided statements to The New York Times and ProPublica between 2018 and 2020 in leaks that appeared “unparalleled in the history of the IRS.”
This disclosure violates IRS Section 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal law.
The Times reported in 2020 that Trump had not paid federal income tax for many years before 2020, and ProPublica in 2021 published a series on discrepancies in Trump’s records. Six years of Trump’s comeback They were later released By the House Ways and Means Committee, which was then controlled by Democrats.
Trump’s lawsuit states that Littlejohn’s disclosures to the news organizations “caused plaintiffs financial and reputational harm and adversely affected President Trump’s support among voters in the 2020 presidential election.”
Littlejohn stole the tax records of other major billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
The president’s lawsuit comes after the US Treasury Department She announced that she was cutting her contracts With Booz Allen Hamilton, earlier this week, after Littlejohn, who worked for the company, was indicted and subsequently jailed on charges of leaking tax information to the media about thousands of the country’s richest people, including the president.
Treasurer Scott Besent said at the time of the announcement that the company “failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including confidential taxpayer information to which it gained access through its contracts with the IRS.”
Representatives of the White House, Treasury and IRS could not immediately be reached for comment.