President Donald Trump, his two eldest sons and the Trump family business on Thursday sued the Internal Revenue Service and the Treasury Department over the leak of their tax information to news organizations during the first Trump administration.
The lawsuit, filed in Florida’s Southern District Court, seeks at least $10 billion in damages on the grounds that the two departments did not properly safeguard the tax returns “from unauthorized inspection and public disclosure.” Trump is suing the government in a personal capacity, not as president.
Former IRS consultant Charles E. Littlejohn was sentenced in 2024 to five years in prison for stealing the tax returns of Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans between 2018 and 2020 and providing them to ProPublica and the New York Times.
Representatives for the New York Times and ProPublica declined to comment. The Treasury Department and the IRS did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Thursday’s lawsuit is another in which Trump has filed a claim for a large amount of money against the government he oversees, which puts him on both sides of the potential negotiating table.
He filed two claims for damages against the government in 2023 and 2024: the first involving the Justice Department over investigations into the connection between Russia and his 2016 presidential campaign, and the other relating to the FBI search of his Mar-a-Lago property in 2022 over alleged mishandling of classified documents.
“It’s interesting because I’m the one that makes a decision. And, you know, that decision would have to go across my desk,” Trump told reporters in October last year. “It’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.”
A likely outcome for those cases, The Washington Post reported, would be to reach a settlement with a Justice Department that Trump has publicly said works for him.
Earlier this week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent canceled all the department’s contracts with consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, citing the leaks from Littlejohn, who was an employee of the firm at the time. The contracts were worth $21 million in total obligations, Treasury said.
The complaint filed Thursday alleges that ProPublica, based on the leaked financial information, “falsely reported” that the tax returns “contained ‘versions of fraud’” and that the family’s accounting firm “engaged in ‘fraud, misconduct or malpractice,’” causing the Trumps reputational and financial harm.
The New York Times in 2020 also published articles detailing more than two decades of Trump’s tax returns after he declined to release them while he was a candidate in the 2016 presidential election or during his first administration — breaking with precedent. The complaint also alleges that these articles contained false information such as that Trump engaged in tax avoidance.
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