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MIAMI (CN) — President Donald Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Department of the Treasury for $10 billion on Thursday over a leak of the president’s tax returns during his first term in office.
In the 27-page complaint filed in Miami federal court, Trump accuses the IRS of not properly safeguarding Trump’s financial information, allowing a former contractor to access his tax returns and disseminate them to “leftist media outlets” like the New York Times and ProPublica.
The president’s sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, join the lawsuit along with the Trump Organization. Trump is suing in his personal capacity and not in his official capacity as president.
Trump contends the IRS has caused him and his sons “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.”
During 2019 and 2020, Charles Littlejohn, working as a consultant for the IRS, obtained the tax returns of some of the wealthiest Americans, including Elon Musk and Florida Senator Rick Scott, and leaked them to the press. The subsequent reports in the the New York Times and ProPublica found the country’s richest people paid little to no income tax.
In 2023, the Justice Department charged Littlejohn with unauthorized disclosure of tax returns. Prosecutors claimed he intentionally applied for a job with the IRS to release Trump’s tax returns because the president was “a threat to democracy.”
Littlejohn was convicted in January 2024 and sentenced to five years in prison. He is currently appealing his sentence.
In his complaint, Trump holds the IRS responsible for not monitoring Littlejohn’s access to the records, which he downloaded from an agency database then uploaded to a private website using his work computer.
“Defendants’ Privacy Act compliance and other security procedures were so insufficient that it took three years for the IRS to detect that Littlejohn breached the confidentiality and security protections of Plaintiffs’ confidential tax returns and related tax information,” Trump says in the complaint. “Similarly, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration has found that the IRS failed to establish safeguards to detect, let alone prevent, unauthorized access to confidential tax return information.”
Trump seeks $1,000 in damages for each unauthorized disclosure of their financial information, including by media outlets and social media, totaling at least $10 billion. He claims violations of the Privacy Act and IRS code.
The Treasury Department and the IRS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump is represented by Florida-based attorney, Alejandro Brito and Daniel Z. Epstein of D.C.’s Epstein & Co. law firm.
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