The US president accuses federal agencies of facilitating his tax return leak
President Donald Trump has filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and the Treasury Department, alleging the agencies failed to protect his confidential tax records from a politically motivated leak that he claims caused “reputational and financial harm.”
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Miami on Thursday, names Trump, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization as plaintiffs. It alleges that the IRS and Treasury “wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee” to leak private tax information to The New York Times and ProPublica, among other outlets.
“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 case centers on former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn, who was sentenced to five years in prison in 2024 after pleading guilty to stealing and disclosing tax records. Littlejohn admitted to leaking Trump’s tax information to The New York Times, which reported in 2020 that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017.
The contractor also provided data on Trump and “all businesses that he had owned” to ProPublica. The lawsuit claims that subsequent reporting falsely suggested the documents contained “versions of fraud.”
The Treasury Department and IRS have yet to comment on the lawsuit.
The filing comes just days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced the cancellation of all department contracts with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, where Littlejohn was employed. Bessent cited the firm’s failure to implement adequate safeguards, calling the move “an essential step to increasing Americans’ trust in government.”
The leak, described by prosecutors as “unparalleled in the IRS’s history,” affected roughly 406,000 taxpayers and spanned more than 15 years of financial data. Trump’s lawsuit seeks at least $10 billion in damages, arguing that the agencies’ negligence enabled a breach that damaged his family’s business and public standing.
