President Donald Trump is suing the IRS and Treasury Department for $10 billion, alleging they failed to prevent the leak of his tax information to news outlets between 2018 and 2020. The lawsuit, filed in a Florida federal court, includes Trump's sons, Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr., and the Trump Organization as plaintiffs. The leak caused reputational and financial harm, public embarrassment, and negatively affected Trump's public standing. In 2024, former IRS contractor Charles Edward Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking tax information about Trump and others to news outlets. Littlejohn, who worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense and national security tech firm, provided data to The New York Times and ProPublica between 2018 and 2020, in leaks that were unprecedented in the IRS's history. The disclosure violated IRS Code 6103, a strict confidentiality law. The Times reported that Trump didn't pay federal income tax for many years before 2020, and ProPublica published a series about discrepancies in Trump's records. Six years of Trump's returns were later released by the then-Democratically controlled House Ways and Means Committee. Trump's suit states that Littlejohn's disclosures caused reputational and financial harm and adversely impacted Trump's support among voters in the 2020 presidential election. Littlejohn also stole tax records of other mega-billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. The Treasury Department cut its contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton earlier this week after Littlejohn was charged and imprisoned for leaking tax information about thousands of the country's wealthiest people, including the president. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that the firm failed to implement adequate safeguards to protect sensitive data.
