Lawyers for President Trump on Friday asked a judge to extend a key deadline in his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, an attempt to give the Justice Department more time to figure out how to respond to the conflict-laden case.
The Justice Department has yet to respond to Mr. Trump’s suit, which argues that the I.R.S. did not do enough to prevent the leak of his tax returns, and faces a Monday deadline to do so. The case has created an extraordinary conflict of interest for the department’s lawyers, who faced the possibility of defending a suit from Mr. Trump while still reporting to him.
Rather than the Justice Department requesting more time to respond, Mr. Trump’s lawyers did so, asking the judge to extend Monday’s deadline by 90 days. Mr. Trump’s lawyers said the Justice Department had agreed to the extension.
“The parties are engaging in discussions and need time to work through how to ensure those discussions can take place productively to avoid protracted litigation,” Mr. Trump’s lawyers wrote. They described the discussion as “designed to resolve this matter.”
Officials at the Justice Department and within the White House have struggled to figure out how to respond to Mr. Trump’s suit. While some former Justice Department lawyers see flaws in the suit, administration officials have discussed different ways to avoid defending it, worried about putting a government lawyer on the other side of a legal matter from the president.
Among the options that Trump administration officials have discussed is asking the judge to delay the case until after Mr. Trump leaves office, or making a filing laying out the inherent conflict for the Justice Department to defend the case. Officials expected that they would ultimately need Mr. Trump’s approval for whatever path they chose, The New York Times reported.
Mr. Trump’s suit against the government he leads also raises the possibility of a settlement, which would involve Mr. Trump’s own appointees approving a potentially gigantic payment to Mr. Trump and his family members.
Mr. Trump’s suit argues that the I.R.S. and Treasury Department did not do enough to prevent Charles Littlejohn, a former contractor for the agency, from providing Mr. Trump’s tax information to The Times and ProPublica. In 2020, citing Mr. Trump’s tax returns, The Times published a series of articles revealing that he had paid little or no income tax for years.
Mr. Littlejohn was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking the tax information of Mr. Trump and thousands of other wealthy Americans.
Andrew Duehren covers tax policy for The Times from Washington.
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