President Donald Trump on Thursday filed a lawsuit in Florida federal court seeking $10 billion from the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Treasury Department, accusing the agencies of failing to prevent a leak of his tax information to news outlets between 2018 and 2020.
The complaint names Trump as well as his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and the Trump Organization, according to the filing described by the Associated Press. The suit alleges that the disclosures violated IRS confidentiality rules and caused harms that include damage to business reputations and effects on Trump’s standing with voters.
In the lawsuit, Trump says the leak led to “reputational and financial harm,” along with claims that it embarrassed the plaintiffs and presented them in a “false light.” The filing also says the disclosures negatively affected President Trump and “the other Plaintiffs’ public standing,” including their support among voters in the 2020 presidential election.
The suit focuses on information that was reportedly made public through journalism during that 2018-to-2020 period. The AP report said it includes disclosures to The New York Times and ProPublica, as well as later releases of six years of Trump returns by the then-Democratically controlled House Ways and Means Committee.
The complaint ties the alleged leak to Charles Edward Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor known as “Chaz,” who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton. In 2024, Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison after pleading guilty, the AP report said, in connection with leaking tax information about Trump and others to news outlets.
The AP report said prosecutors described the leaks as “unparalleled in the IRS’s history,” and that the disclosures violated IRS Code 6103, one of the strictest confidentiality laws in federal statute. The AP report also said Littlejohn stole tax records of other mega-billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
The legal action comes shortly after the Treasury Department said it had cut contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said at the time that the firm “failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data, including the confidential taxpayer information it had access to through its contracts with the Internal Revenue Service,” according to the AP report.
Representatives of the White House, Treasury and IRS were not immediately available for comment, the AP report said.
Discipline note: The proposal does not include any additional figures beyond the one verified FRED series provided in the input, and no validated figure is referenced in the story text.