When Donald Trump and his family turned to the courts to demand $10 billion from the IRS, the filing immediately put a question of suitability in front of legal observers: whether a president who leads the executive branch can properly sue a federal agency within that executive branch. The complaint was filed in federal court in Florida on Thursday, according to the Associated Press, and it names Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as co-plaintiffs alongside the president.
The lawsuit says the leak involved confidential tax records belonging to Trump and the Trump Organization, and it argues that the disclosure caused “reputational and financial” harm, including “public embarrassment,” and that it unfairly portrayed the president and the other plaintiffs. It also says the leak negatively affected Trump’s position in public life.
The filing ties the alleged tax-record disclosure to Charles Edward Littlejohn, an ex-contractor of the IRS who was sentenced in 2024 to five years in prison after pleading guilty. Prosecutors said Littlejohn, who had worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, leaked confidential tax information to two media outlets between 2018 and 2020, the AP reported. The complaint does not name the media outlets in the court documents, but the AP said the timing and descriptions match reporting connected to The New York Times and ProPublica.
The AP noted that The New York Times reported in 2020 that Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes in the year he first entered the White House and paid no federal income tax in some other years because of large reported losses. It also cited ProPublica’s investigative reporting on taxes paid by wealthy Americans.
Even with the alleged wrongdoing connected to IRS confidentiality, experts who spoke with the AP said Trump appears to have a legitimate basis for bringing a legal claim. Those experts also questioned two elements that would be central in court: the amount of money Trump is seeking and the decision to pursue the litigation at all. The AP reported that the disclosure was said to violate IRS Code 6103, a confidentiality provision that offers a remedy to people whose tax information is leaked, including a minimum payment of $1,000 for each disclosure.
David Gair, a tax lawyer at Troutman Pepper Locke in Dallas who represents individuals whose tax information appeared in the leak, said that many of his clients have already reached out about pursuing their own claims against the government. Gair told the AP that people were asking, “if he can do it, why can’t I,” and he expected “many more” lawsuits to follow.
Other advocates, however, argued that the case risked turning a resolved problem into a new payout. Amy Hanauer, the executive director of the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said that a remedy has already occurred: Littlejohn’s imprisonment, the Trump administration Treasury Department canceling contracts with the company that employed the contractor, and the IRS issuing a rare public apology to the affected taxpayers. She also said the IRS committed to strengthen its data-protection procedures as a result of the episode.
Hanauer told the AP that even if a judge rejects Trump’s claims as meritless or “absurd,” there is still a “large risk” the IRS could agree to a settlement and pay a large amount of taxpayer dollars to Trump. She said the size and posture of the case could therefore matter independently of whether the litigation ultimately succeeds.
The AP said Trump addressed the potential conflict of interests by pointing to a separate lawsuit he filed that sought about $230 million in damages from the Department of Justice, tied to investigations into allegations about his 2016 campaign ties to Russia and the 2022 Mar-a-Lago classified documents case. In that context, Trump suggested that he should “reach an agreement with myself.” The AP also reported that Trump said any settlement “could be a substantial” amount and that it might go to “charity,” though a White House representative did not provide details on which organizations would receive money.
The lawsuit’s scope, attorneys said, would likely turn on questions about what damages Trump and the plaintiffs can prove and what the court does with any statutory remedies tied to the confidentiality violations. Gair told the AP that people whose information was leaked would not necessarily need to show compensatory damages, even as Trump is also seeking punitive damages. Gair said he expected Trump could face difficulty proving real losses, saying, “I have a hard time believing he really had losses, but maybe.”