President Trump sued the Internal Revenue Service on Thursday for the unauthorized leak of his tax returns during his first term, demanding that the government agency pay him at least $10 billion.
Mr. Trump, as well as his two eldest sons and his family business, charged in the lawsuit that the I.R.S. and the Treasury Department had failed to prevent a former I.R.S. contractor, Charles Littlejohn, from gaining access to Mr. Trump’s tax documents, which were shared with The New York Times.
Mr. Littlejohn is serving a five-year prison sentence for taking tax documents about Mr. Trump and other wealthy Americans and giving them to news outlets. While federal law closely guards tax information, Mr. Trump, with the lawsuit filed in federal court in Florida, is now seeking billions in damages for the disclosures.
Mr. Trump appointed the leaders of the I.R.S. and Treasury Department, setting up the possibility of Mr. Trump’s aides deciding how to respond to a lawsuit brought by the president. Mr. Trump has previously demanded that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, a request that had no parallel in American history.
The I.R.S. and Treasury Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Littlejohn worked for the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, and earlier this week, the Treasury Department canceled all of its federal contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, worth $21 million, over the breach.
Mr. Trump had refused to disclose his tax returns to the public, the first president to do so since the 1970s.
In 2020, citing Mr. Trump’s tax documents, The Times reported that the former president paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he was elected president and that he had not paid any income taxes in 10 of the previous 15 years. In late 2022, House Democrats on the Ways and Means Committee released six years of Mr. Trump’s tax returns after a yearslong legal fight.
Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.
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