President Trump is taking his fight over his tax returns to court—against his own government. The POTUS, his sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and the Trump Organization have filed a federal lawsuit in Miami accusing the IRS and the Treasury Department of failing to safeguard their confidential tax data from an employee who later admitted to leaking it, CNBC reports. They're seeking at least $10 billion in damages.
The suit centers on Charles "Chaz" Littlejohn, a former IRS contractor now serving a five-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to disclosing tax return information. He pleaded guilty in 2023, Fox News reports, and confessed to leaking Trump's tax records to the New York Times and the returns of Trump and other wealthy individuals to ProPublica. Prosecutors said the leak appeared to be "unparalleled in the IRS's history," the AP reports. The complaint argues the agencies had a legal duty to prevent such disclosures and failed to do so, causing reputational and financial harm and "public embarrassment."
A spokesperson for Trump's legal team said the IRS "wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee" to pass private data to "left-wing news outlets." The lawsuit also criticizes ProPublica's reporting, saying it falsely suggested Trump's documents showed "versions of fraud"—a phrase that in the 2019 story is attributed to a University of California-Berkeley professor who reviewed the records.
The filing comes three days after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced he was canceling all Treasury contracts with consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton, which employed Littlejohn as a contractor. CNBC calls it "all but unheard of" for a president to sue his own administration (though Trump has done it before), and notes conflict-of-interest questions will likely be raised due to the "exorbitant damages figure."